


Loaf

by xbritomartx



Category: Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-06 06:59:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8739307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xbritomartx/pseuds/xbritomartx
Summary: Following Golden Morning, Contessa decides to bake the perfect loaf of bread—without using her power. Things go awry. Is this fluffy crack or cracky fluff? Only a Thinker 12 could say for sure!





	1. Contessa Goes Shopping

Contessa stood in one the normally deserted kitchens that studded Teacher's pocket-dimensional lair. She had placed every ingredient essential to making the bread her mother had once taught her to bake on the counter, but something was wrong.

Olive oil. Milk. Water. Salt. Flour—no. She frowned at the canister in front of her. Not flour. Sugar. Where was the flour?

Her power automatically activated and informed her that the last of their flour had gone into a batch of extra-gooey chocolate chip cookies for Ingenue.

She felt her lips tighten as irritation washed over her. Her intent was to do this without using her power at all, but it kept providing her information and help every time she had a stray thought. Even now it was telling her how she could order the missing flour through Teacher's underlings.

No. She would do this herself. She put the milk back in the refrigerator and left to find a teleportation pad.

Teacher looked up from the monitor he was observing over Saint's shoulder. "Are you going somewhere?" he asked.

"Bet," Contessa told him as she opened the control panel to the machine. She wished, not for the first time, that Doormaker had survived. "It's important."

Teacher frowned. "When will you return? I have a lead on the Simurgh's project."

"On completion of my mission," she said. Providing an exact time was within her capabilities, but she didn't want to report to him. She waited a moment, long enough for her refusal to provide a direct answer to sink in. "Likely less than four hours."

He gave her a curt nod, accepting her message on both its levels, and she stepped onto the pad.

The teleporter spat Contessa out in an American city that a mild strafing by Scion had left significantly worse for the wear but still in existence. She immediately started a path to the nearest government-run food distribution point that would let her avoid being killed, injured, subjected to master or stranger powers, or otherwise harmed, inconvenienced, or dirtied.

She passed a large, now abandoned and crumbling building that had a statue of a giant badminton birdie on its lawn. Not for the first time, she thought that people on the earth Scion had infested had somehow gotten things wrong. They'd had wealth and luxury to a degree she still couldn't fathom after thirty years of observation, and they'd used it to do things like _that_.

It took her half an hour to reach the supply warehouse, now closed for the day. She bypassed the unpowered guards, scaled the side of the building, climbed in through a window on the third floor, and hopped over a balcony to land lightly on the second.

Conveniently, she'd landed right next to the flour. She checked the label, picked up the largest bag there, hoisted it onto her shoulder, and placed two hundred dollar bills on the nearest table as payment.

Contessa had almost made it back to her teleportation spot when her power warned her that she'd been spotted. She continued, more slowly, and waited to be spoken to.

"I have to ask," someone said from behind her. "Do you know why your power tells you to do things, or do you just follow the steps blindly?"

She turned, still balancing her burden with her power, to stare at the metal-skinned man who had spoken. He was barefoot, wearing the white and blue pants of the Wardens' uniform. A tentacled girl was wrapped around his torso, fastened to him with iron rings. "My power is the exact opposite of blindness, Weld. Hello, Sveta."

He walked forward, closing the distance between the two of them to a few feet. She let him; even with Garrote on his shoulder, he wasn't a concern. "What I'm asking you is what plan, what scheme, what twisted plot could _possibly_ require you to carry twenty pounds of cocaine around in broad daylight?"

She could think of several, but that was beside the point. "This is flour."

"It's cocaine," he repeated. "The supply point you raided is a front for a distribution operation."

She shifted the bag so he could see the letters spelling out FLOUR.

Weld morphed his hand into a blade, sliced her flour bag open, then changed his hand back as powder spilled to the ground.

The flare of anger she felt briefly gave her a path to killing Weld and Garrote both, but she consciously amended it to making him apologize and replace her flour. Before she could start, he extended a palm full of white powder to her. She reached out, touched a finger to the flour, and put it in her mouth to taste.

He wasn't wrong.

Well.

Contessa dropped the bag, turned on her heel, and headed directly to a bright orange Fiat parked haphazardly across the street.

"What are you doing?" Garrote called.

"Getting a refund," Contessa said, asking her power to provide a path to locating the source of the cocaine. She smashed the Fiat's window and opened the door.

Weld ran up to the passenger side window and leaned in, careful not to touch the metal. "You can't just steal a car!" he shouted.

She looked at him like he was an idiot, which he was, while her fingers hot-wired the vehicle.

"He means that if you steal a car, we'll arrest you," Garrote said.

"Won't work," she replied, as the car's engine turned over. "I don't want to be arrested. Just like I didn't want to be killed the last time we met."

Weld glared at her. Judging by the way her tentacles were loosening and regripping Weld's shoulders, Garrote was getting agitated.

"Drug-running is worse than borrowing an abandoned vehicle," she added.

"I think," Weld said, very deliberately, "that the merits of your dubious ethical reasoning are lost on us. Leave the car and let us take on the drug ring."

Contessa shifted the car into drive. "I know where they are and you don't. Come with or stay behind, I don't care."

"We'll come with you," Weld said.

Garrote's tentacles continued to contract and expand. "But--"

"I wouldn't invite you into my car if you were going to hurt me," Contessa said.

The two Wardens crammed into the passenger seat--she noticed Garrote had opened the door so he wouldn't bond with the handle. The right half of the car tilted nearly to the ground as six hundred pounds of mildly annoyed metal entered and got situated.

There was silence as she pulled out, and then the engine began to whine in protest as they started to climb uphill.

"Maybe I should get out," Weld suggested.

She swerved, missing a pothole that could have eaten their vehicle for breakfast by less than an inch. "I've taken you into account. This will work."

"You said we could ask you questions after humanity won," Weld said. "Was that another lie?"

"No."

Garrote spoke up. "Are you _sorry_?"

Contessa judged it was safe to throw the question back at her. "Should I be? You're only here to criticize the experiments _because_ of the experiments. You, me, and every other human who is alive or who will come after, _ever_. Does your pain have more weight than total extinction?"

Garrote's tentacles began to spasm. Contessa ignored them; she hadn't provoked the girl to the point where she would lose self-control. When Weld finally spoke, his voice was low and dangerous. "Are you calling us selfish?"

"I do feel that way," said Contessa, unruffled. "I won't insist on the point, because even my power says I can't debate you on morals, Henry." She let him think that was because she accepted his arguments, but the fact was that Cauldron had brainwashed him to always do the right thing, to be the pure, upright, morally uncomplicated team player the Wards and the PRT needed. The boy he once was had wanted to be a hero, and they'd made it impossible for him not to be. No words, even ones prepared by her power, would change his mind.

Weld finally broke the shocked silence she'd caused by releasing his name. "You know who I am."

"You're unusual enough to stick out in my mind," Contessa lied. "You were fourteen, severed in half in the same car accident that killed your mother. Result: metal-focused brute/changer power. So far, so useless. But psychometry gave us some interesting ideas."

"My personality?"

"Hero all over again, only a so-called monster. Ideal for convincing the public to accept Case 53s." Contessa began the final step, steering the car up yet another hill. "The idea was to get the Protectorate on board with automatically integrating you all when we released you into Bet. Give you a group, help you get on your feet, all while making the Protectorate stronger."

"I knew the Protectorate was grooming me," he said. "That was you all along? It wasn't about me? It was just another one of your plots?"

"It was always about who you are at your core, if you'll forgive the turn of phrase. You were originally an Alexandria plot to bring the Case 53s into the Protectorate. Then you were a Simurgh plot to destroy Cauldron. Congratulations on her success." She set the parking break. "Alive or dead?"

Weld blinked. "What?"

She gestured at their destination, a two-story concrete building. "Twenty-one gang members in there. It's a regional distribution node, accounts for roughly ninety percent of the drug problem in your jurisdiction. Do you want them alive, or do you want them dead?"

"No killing," Weld said firmly. "Sveta, can you knock the fence o—"

Contessa climbed on top of the car, then jumped up to grab an overhanging branch. The two Wardens were still struggling out of the car--in his haste, Weld had gotten himself stuck--when she cleared the fence.

She landed on #1, one of two men who had come out to investigate the sound of the arriving vehicle. His fall broke her own and took him out of the fight. She rolled and came up to grab a lit cigarette from #2's mouth with her left hand and slam her right hand into his ear. He collapsed and hit his head on the pavement.

#3 was standing in front of the entrance. He reached for a radio when he noticed her, but she was too close. She twisted his arm just so, breaking it and releasing the radio, which cracked when it hit the ground. She used his access card to open the door, revealing what appeared to be a maintenance bay.

#4 and #5 were just inside, busy refueling vehicles. She wrested control of the hose from one of them, sprayed fuel all over the ground and workbench, and dropped the cigarette onto it. She ducked behind an oil drum as the gasoline caught fire. When she stood back up, the two women were stranded on one side of the bay by a wall of flame and she held a crowbar. #6 began to wiggle out from under the vehicle he was fiddling with, but she swung the crowbar into the bottlejack he was relying on, knocking it over and bringing the truck down onto his abdomen.

#7 was on the other side of the door she opened forcefully, and the edge caught him in the jaw. He stumbled back and fell, landing hard on his ass. Contessa kicked him in the diaphragm, and he curled up coughing. She turned a corner and jabbed two fingers into #8's eye—he only had the one. He screamed, and she took out his right kneecap with the crowbar as she stepped by him to relieve #9 of his semiautomatic. Two punches and he crumpled.

#10 was reaching for an intercom. She shot it, then turned the weapon on him. "On the ground, hands on the back of your head. Wait for the Wardens." He obeyed and she moved to the next room, where she discovered that #11, #12, #13, and #14 were _children_. They were apparently responsible for preparing the product for distribution.

She pointed at some folding chairs lined up against the wall. "Go sit over there and you'll get to see some superheroes," she said.

A glance at the table they surrounded showed that their organization was not only packing cocaine, but also methamphetamine, heroin, and a pile of neon-green pills she didn't recognize on sight but her power identified as Tinker bullshit. It was manifestly stupid to ingest substances prepared by a Tinker. That hadn't stopped anyone before the world had ended, of course, and it looked like bad habits lingered.

"Move," she shouted. She punctuated the order by dropping the crow bar. The kids ran for the chairs, and the noise brought #15 and #16, unarmed women, out of a side-room. They stopped dead when they saw Contessa.

The one in front spoke. "What's going on? Who are you?"

"It's over," Contessa said, voicing the words that would neutralize them without killing them. "The Wardens are here. Sit with the kids."

She looked at the children again as she moved to a set of stairs. The world would be better off with their parents dead. Why had she bothered to ask someone else, let alone Weld, for direction?

The answer came to her, of course. Habit. Letting someone else give her the conditions for victory was easier, more routine, than deciding them for herself.

She kicked open the door she found at the top of the stairs. Four men and a woman were sitting inside the conference room on the other side. Before they could do more than look surprised, she shot #17, a man who was standing and burly enough to be a body guard, in the foot. She then threw the now-empty pistol at #18, a younger man who was leaning back in his chair. It hit him in the face and unbalanced him; the chair collapsed and the resulting head injury ensured he didn't get back up.

The two remaining men didn't rush her, but reached into their pockets and popped brightly colored pills like the ones she'd seen downstairs. The woman ducked out through another door.

More Tinker drugs. Preternatural strength and endurance for #19, enhanced dexterity and speed for #20. Not enough to count as either a brute or a mover, but enough to end a fight with a normal human.

She had _just_ enough time to shut her eyes cover her nose and mouth with her handkerchief before #20 sprayed her with something that looked like mace but which her power informed her was a hallucinogen. Still blind, she kicked him in the groin and he tripped over the unconscious #18. Contessa stomped on his throat and kicked the spray out of reach.

#19 charged her, but she sidestepped him and let his own strength and momentum take him through the wall, sending drywall everywhere. He fell to the ground a story below, a little shocked but mostly unhurt.

He would probably feel the punches Weld was dealing him once the drug wore off.

Contessa brushed the drywall dust off her suit jacket, drew one of her knives, and went to find #21, whom process of elimination suggested was the Tinker.

Thirty seconds later, Contessa stood in the ruins of the Tinker's lab, again holding a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. The Tinker herself was unconscious, choked out and bound to a chair with Contessa's belt and her own clothes.

She reviewed the situation. Unpowered personnel would arrive to round up the gang members. Some low-level healer would likely fix the ones she'd hurt. Weld and Garrote could direct the cleanup of the area. Nobody would die, the gang would stop using government supply centers as a front, and the Tinker's drugs would never make it to market. Not bad for three minutes of work.

Tentacles lashed into the room she stood in, wrapping around a bench. Garrote's face followed, and Contessa asked for a path to safety; she did not want to die the way the Doctor had. Or at all.

"Tinker lab," she said, once Garrote had settled on the bench. "Make sure that people who can be affected by inhaling organic substances do not come in there. You and Weld will both be fine."

"Because we're monsters," Garrote said. "Something else you think we should thank you for, I guess."

Contessa looked at Garrote, pretending to consider her situation. "You know, I can't undo the memory erasure, but my power can answer most questions you, Weld, and the others might have about your past. Where you come from, your families."

Garrote went very still, and Contessa went on. "Take some time to think about it, ask the others and make a list of the questions you want answered. Just know that none of the stories ended well. We collected dying people."

"What was my name?"

"Vesela," Contessa said, moving to the door before Garrote's body could respond to the increased emotion. "Your brothers were Boleslav and Feliks."

Garrote frowned. "I think--I think I almost remember Bolek. How do we get in touch with you?"

Contessa paused in the doorway. "I'll find you when you're ready."

The last thing she did before she left to return to her teleportation pad was drag a sack out of one of the cellars and use her power to verify that, yes, this time she had definitely found flour.

Teacher's base was in disarray when she returned. Hordes of white-clad "students" rushed around to a red-faced Teacher's shouted directions and Ingenue, Contessa thought, was laughing but trying not to show it.

"What happened?" Contessa asked.

Teacher ran a hand through the remnants of his hair. "The Wardens just destroyed one of our major bases on Bet," he explained. "They decapitated my Midwestern operations and arrested one of my biochemical tinkers. I have no idea how they found us out. Can you--?"

"Of course," she said. _I want to know who was responsible for destroying Teacher's base on Earth Bet just now._ One step. "One mo—"

Think: I did it.

"Contessa?" Teacher asked.

"Um. I just—"

_Path: not getting caught._

Three steps.

"—don't understand how he did it." She furrowed her brow. "But my power says that Saint told them via his copy of Dragon."

"Is that so?" Teacher's eyes narrowed, and he turned on the vacant-eyed man tapping away at one of the keyboards. "No wonder he says he's not able to find anything in the Wardens' systems. Saint!"

"Sir?"

"Go outside with that man," he said.

"Yes, sir." Saint shuffled over to the bodyguard that Teacher had indicated. He didn't see Teacher mouth the words _kill him_ at the guard, but Contessa did. She found herself trying to think whether saving Saint's life would be worth it, but the guard and Saint were gone before she could form any conclusions.

Ingenue interrupted her reverie. "Is that flour?"

"Cocaine," she said, perfectly deadpan.

Satyr frowned. "Can I ask why you need a giant sack of cocaine?"

"Obviously you can ask," Contessa said, and left for the kitchen. There wasn't a door to Teacher's ops room, so their voices trailed after her.

"I'm from _Vegas_ , and even I'm telling you that's ridiculous—"

"To be fair, Satyr, that was a stupid question."

"I guess you can get away with anything when you have a fucking 12 power rating."

Contessa shook her head and plotted a path to baking without being disturbed.


	2. Contessa Orders a Pizza

Alarms blared. Smoke and rubble were everywhere. Students, oblivious to the charring that marred their otherwise perfectly white costumes, shouted panicked instructions at each other as they ran to and fro.

They needn't be so worried. There was no attack, and the (very small, practically not even there) fire had been short-lived.

Contessa calmly sat at a desk in the middle of it all, answering Teacher's daily list of questions and pretending, mostly to herself, that her first attempt at bread hadn't ended in this disaster.

Flour could explode.

Apparently.

She would have to take other measures.

She adjusted her fedora to make sure it covered her singed eyebrows and came to the last question. _Dragon's location?_ Her power told her that Dragon and Defiant were in a small settlement on Earth Lamed, the latter in his workshop and the former building snowmen. Teacher had good reason to fear them, perhaps even more now that Saint was dead, but there were more important things than Teacher's emotions. She personally thought that Dragon might be able to outwit the Simurgh one day, and humanity needed all the help it could get in case of the appearance of a third entity.

She wrote a large question mark next to the prompt.

Teacher came into the room. "What happened here?" he asked.

"Oh, who knows," Ingenue said. She and Satyr were standing by, admiring the chaos.

" _I_ don't, and I'd like to," Teacher said sharply. "Could you find out, Contessa?"

Contessa put her fountain pen down and closed her eyes, pretending to ask her power about the source of the chaos. After a moment, she opened them. "Someone set fire to the kitchen," she said. "Not an intruder, just a bad cook."

"Who?"

She let her eyes flick to Ingenue, who was standing on tiptoe to whisper in Satyrical's ear. He was sniggering, and neither of them noticed that Contessa had just framed them for the ruined kitchen.

Teacher accepted the lie with a grimace, but he didn't turn on his lieutenants. "Did you find out who the Simurgh's baby was?"

"Eidolon," she said. She handed Teacher her notebook. He was careful to ask very little of her, and in return she gave him information that would further goals they shared. He checked it when he could, paranoid as he was, and always found she was right. This, in turn, increased both his reliance on her and his paranoia. It was not a situation that would be tenable in the long term.

He frowned. "I see. Do you think this gives credence to Tattletale's theory about their origins?"

"Perhaps. Or perhaps she _wants_ us to think Tattletale was right."

"We will need contingencies for both," Teacher said, rubbing his chin.

"I have some ideas," Contessa said. "We can discuss them once I get more insight into how the Wardens are reacting."

"Going to Bet again?"

"New York," she confirmed. "I think I'm going to use one of the handheld teleporters, if you could spare it. Last time I ran into some old enemies and would rather not run that risk again."

He nodded, and she was able to leave within twenty minutes.

*

Step one, breaking and entering.

Despite the fact it was the middle of the day, the young woman who owned the apartment was dead asleep. There were blackout curtains at every window, and Contessa needed to rely on her power to navigate to the kitchen, where a laptop sat on a small table. She opened it up and fed it a password.

Just as the desktop finished loading, the lights came on, revealing a blonde-haired woman rubbing sleep out of bleary green eyes. She blinked, eventually focusing on Contessa.

"Oh, Christ," Tattletale said. "I thought I made it real fucking clear I never wanted to see you again."

"Close your eyes," Contessa suggested.

"Fuck off. I have a headache." She held Contessa's gaze for a long while, then she turned to rummage around in a cupboard. She withdrew a blue foil package. "What do you want? Is this a convoluted path to getting Oreos? I'm not going to share them."

Contessa shook her head.

"Saying no to _Oreos_? I'll have you know these cost me two hundred eighty dollars." Tattletale popped one into her mouth and regarded her unwanted guest. "You don't eat much, do you? Tinkertech. Reduces your need to sleep, too. You were upset about it at the time, but you don't care anymore. Wouldn't reverse it if you could."

Contessa didn't respond.

"You know, you look kind of like an Oreo," Tattletale said. "Except instead of being filled with delicious crème, you're stuffed with dehumanizing Tinkertech and shame."

"I need two things from you," Contessa said, ignoring Tattletale's attempts to goad her. "Money and information in return. Lots of money for what it is, information I know you want."

"I'm in the mood to bargain." Tattletale filled a glass of milk and settled down at the table. "I want triple whatever you're offering."

"You'll take what I have."

Tattletale's grin flickered a little, but she reached out her hand. "We'll see."

Contessa dropped a flashdrive in Tattletale's palm. It contained analysis on the Simurgh's flight pattern since Golden Morning from Dragon's systems, data stolen from the Wardens, footage of Lung destroying the Simurgh's Eidolon. All taken from Teacher's base without his knowledge.

"You're with Teacher?" Tattletale asked as she looked from the flash drive to Contessa. Her eyes narrowed. "And he doesn't know you're here. Why? On both counts."

"Working against fate," Contessa said. "Watch."

Tattletale plugged the flashdrive into her laptop and watched. Finally, she asked a question. "Do you know how Bonesaw made the clones?"

Contessa's power supplied the answer. "Her own knowledge of powers combined with Blasto's tech and stolen memories from Cranial."

"Yeah. So when we were at that base, waiting for Scion to fry us, she had access to Bonesaw and therefore data on how to build this. I guess she knew Eidolon's DNA from fighting him so much. What's missing?"

"Memories," Contessa said, mostly because her power told her Tattletale wanted to hear it.

"Yep," said Tattletale, smugly radiating smugness. "This is definitely Eidolon, as I think you know. But it's a _blank_ Eidolon. The same connection to _that_ passenger, the one that she responds to, but no memories to inform how he'd direct them."

Contessa could see how that might play out. The Simurgh, leveraging a human child to further her own autonomy. Filter her own agenda through his power. What could that do? Why would she want that?

"I wish I understood more about their psychology," Tattletale said, mirroring Contessa's thoughts. "She doesn't really need him, but she wants him. I know what he got from their relationship, but I couldn't get enough out of her to figure out what _they_ got."

Contessa thought back to a vision she'd had over thirty years prior, of the godling's ideal future. _Eleven more_ , they'd said, on top of the nine superweapons then in play. Twenty in all.

It had taken her too long to realize what that part of her vision had _meant_. Another failure. She wouldn't compound that failure by hiding her knowledge _now_. "There are, or could be, a lot more Endbringers. I don't know if twenty is the maximum, but I know there can be at least that many."

"Fuck me."

Contessa didn't disagree with the sentiment.

"How does it feel, knowing you released them?" Tattletale burst out. "That you brought the Simurgh down on yourself? That you killed all those people? You fucking _idio—_ "

"Path to making Lisa Wilbourn the stupidest person in any room," Contessa said neutrally. A warning.

Tattletale stopped, momentarily outraged. Then she looked down into her milk and grinned a little. She'd scored her points. "Okay, Shame Oreo. What's the other thing you wanted?"

"Map. All the libraries in the area, functional and abandoned." Contessa reached under her seat, retrieving a satchel. "Here's five hundred thousand dollars."

Contessa knew her request was ridiculous, but she didn't want to use her power. She rationalized that asking Tattletale was just another version of buying a cookbook—which she needed. After the explosion in Teacher's kitchen, she could safely assume that she misremembered all of her mother's lessons.

Tattletale nearly choked on her cookie. "Tricks? Traps?"

"I would hardly tell you if there were, and you wouldn't notice in any event."

Tattletale conceded the point. "Give me a few minutes."

She needed twenty in total, most of which was spent on the internet. "Here you go. Only viable ones left are here, here, and here. I also wrote down the name and location of the other New Yorks' libraries next to the portals that lead to them."

Contessa checked the map's accuracy with his power. Satisfied, she folded it up and tucked it into her jacket pocket and left Tattletale's apartment. There was one more thing she needed to do before she went to collect the book. How should she go about it?

She stopped suddenly and turned to look down the alley she was passing. Four men were beating up a fifth. Organized crime, her power informed her. The aggressors worked for a protection racket.

She turned into the alleyway and tapped one of the enforcers on the shoulder. "Excuse me, may I borrow your cell phone?"

He looked her up and down, clearly found everything about her ridiculous. "Are you fucking serious, lady?"

She jabbed him in the nerve cluster at his right elbow. He yelped and dropped his cell phone, and she caught it.

"Thanks, friend," she said, and tapped out ten digits at her power's behest. She stepped back and kicked the man in the groin as he advanced, trying to reclaim his cell phone.

A man answered on the second ring. "Tony's Pizza and Subs, what can I do you for?"

The groin-kicked man's buddy lowered himself into a stance a football tackler might assume and charged her. She stepped aside at the last second. "I'd like to place an order for carryout," she said, as he ran himself head-first into a dumpster.

"Sure," Tony said. "What's the name on it?"

The third man advanced a little more cautiously. He carried a baton that he'd been using on their victim. She drew her knife and flicked it into his left eyeball. "Contessa," she said, as he went down screaming.

"Huh?" Tony asked. He probably hadn't heard her over the man's cries.

Contessa kicked him in the teeth, shutting him up. "C-o-n-t-e-s-s-a," she clarified, speaking a little bit more loudly. She bent over him and collected the baton he'd dropped.

"Right," Tony said, "what do you want?"

"Two large pizzas," Contessa said. She took note of the last man currently able to stand. He was mustachioed and frozen for the moment, clearly unsure how to deal with her. That probably made him a touch smarter than his friends. "One with ham, pineapple, and red pepper. The other with pepperoni, olives, and extra cheese."

She directed her attention back to groin-kicked man, who was starting to recover. She brought the baton down on the back of his neck, and he collapsed again.

"That'll be sixty dollars," Tony said. Contessa glanced back over her shoulder. Mustache man had settled on a course of action: shoot her. He was going for a pistol, but his shaking hand was making it hard for him to draw. "It'll be ready in twenty minutes."

She knelt next to the man who had run into a dumpster and picked his pocket. His wallet contained a Starbucks membership card and three twenties.

"Thanks, Tony." She pressed _end_ for the call and threw the phone at mustache man, and it hit him in the face just as he brought his pistol to bear on her. He dropped it, she closed the distance and caught it, and blew one of his kneecaps out.

Ignoring his screams, she threw the pistol in the dumpster and retrieved her knife. She wiped it off on her quarry's shirt and looked up at their victim. He was staring wide-eyed at her, bleeding from a split lip.

"Something tells me you should get your family and leave town today," she said kindly. She stood up, restoring her knife to its place at her belt, and smoothed her jacket. "I've heard the portal in Brockton Bay is open."

"Uh, I, um," he said. "Th-thank you?"

She tipped her hat at him and continued on her path.

Tony's pizza place was only two blocks from her final destination for the day, a third-story apartment not far from the Wardens' headquarters. She tapped on the door four times in rapid succession, paused, and added another two taps.

The man who opened the door was in his early twenties had ash-gray holes in place of eyes. He was wearing a Legend t-shirt and blue basketball shorts that had been marketed at much younger teens.

"Hi, Raj. I brought pizza," she said.

He opened the door wide enough for her to come through.

"How have you been?"

He moved his hands, slowly, in what her power identified as American Sign Language. _They make me go to school. I am learning how to talk like this._

"Wow, that's pretty cool."

He smiled briefly and reverted to Morse code. _Bored. No bad guys to find._

"That sucks," she said. "I think the heroes are trying to give you a break. You deserve it. You saved the world."

The heroes also probably had qualms about exploiting someone with apparent developmental difficulties—qualms the Doctor had most certainly not shared.

_Still bored._

She smiled. "I'll ask the heroes to let you start working again."

_For you?_

"Not yet."

_Why?_

Contessa had to ask her power for a way of breaking down the problem with Teacher into terms he could understand. "I found a man who wants to do a lot of dangerous things. But he's very scared of other people and wants to hide while he does the dangerous things. I'm keeping an eye on him, but he could hurt you if you came with me."

He tapped out a number. _23_. Doormaker.

"Yes. Like that."

They sat in silence for a while.

"I miss him, too," she said, responding to a thought he hadn't expressed. She'd spent three decades working with him, and she had been the only one consistently able to communicate with him before Clairvoyant had come along.

She also missed the doors.

_Why?_

"Why what?"

_Die._

"Because of Scion," she said.

_Not Sion. Valcree_ , he tapped.

Had the Wardens really not bothered to explain to him why his friend had died? Had they thought he was too impaired to notice or care? She took care to keep her anger off her face, because he'd notice and respond. "She wanted to save people and thought she could use his power, but it was locked up. He died so she could get it open. He saved thousands of people."

His only response was to reach for another slice of pizza and eat it. Halfway through that, his head snapped up.

"What do you see?" she asked.

_Legend_. He frowned. _Fast._ _Mad._

"Yes, he's mad at me," Contessa said. "It's okay. You can let him in."

As Raj stood up to go to the door, she grabbed a slice of the closest pizza—the one with olives, as it turned out—and slouched back in her chair.

Legend strode past the clairvoyant, barely noticing him.

"I got a report you were in the area," he said. Tattletale must have said something, she supposed. "We tracked you to a carryout place and then to here. What are you doing with him?"

"Isn't it obvious?" she asked. "I'm evilly sitting in this helpless chair I've made evil with my evil presence and I'm evilly eating evil pizza I evilly obtained with an evil phone call and evilly filling the innocent, victimized head of the pure victim I evilly victimized with evil talk about dead-yet-persistently-evil mutual friends of evil and evil thoughts of evilly playing evil video games about evil."

"I can see you don't take my concerns seriously."

"Evil laughter," Contessa said with complete indifference. "Evil mustache twirl."

"Mocking me doesn't make your decisions or actions less immoral," Legend said grimly.

"Utilitarianism is a perfectly valid ethical philosophy. In light of humanity's survival, I'd say it's much more effective than angsty recrimination." She finished the pizza slice. "Can I get back to my conversation?"

"He doesn't talk."

"'Legend hasn't bothered to learn how to listen to him' is not the same thing as 'he can't talk,'" Contessa said. "And you really should learn if you want to style yourself as his advocate. It took him thirty seconds to tell me that he's bored and wants to help catch bad guys."

"We're trying to take him away from that, get him acclimated to society, help him become more independent without being pulled this way and that for his power. Maybe get therapy for the decade or so of abuse."

Contessa yawned. She didn't even use her power to fake it.

"He thinks his name is a fucking number! How can you take this so lightly, you fucking—"

"Clarence, shut the fuck up. He knows what his name is. If he hasn't shared it with you, there's a reason. He's a grown man who saved the world. I think he's entitled to make choices of his own." She gestured at Raj, whose brow was furrowed in concern and confusion at the fact his friends were fighting. "Look at his shirt. He wants to help you. Let him."

"I'm going to lose this fight."

"There's no fight aside from the one you're trying to pick," Contessa said. "Everyone in this room wants the best for him. We all want him to be a hero and to be a grown up. The best way to do that is to stop making him sit on his butt all day."

Raj suddenly grinned. _Butt_ , he repeated.

"What he'd say?"

"Figure it out," she snapped. "My time is the single most valuable commodity humanity as a collective has. You squander fortunes every second you make me spend talking your goddamn ego down."

"Then you can't seriously expect me to believe you're _just_ here to eat pizza and play video games with him!"

"He's important to me. You, not so much. Consider his offer to help. After you leave."

Legend's mouth compressed into a thin, angry line. He finally wrenched his attention to the clairvoyant, whom he acknowledged for the first time. "Is it okay if she stays here? You don't have to say yes."

Raj nodded. He looked unhappy and confused. She'd have to fix that.

"Fine. But if something happens to him, or you kidnap him and force him to do anything, you'll answer to me." He turned to go.

"I'm rolling my evil eyes at you," Contessa called after him.

The door slammed.

She straightened up and looked to Raj. "Grand Theft Auto?" she said brightly.

He nodded.

*

Contessa didn't make her way to the first library on her list until well after night had fallen. She cheated a little by using her power to pick her way through the stacks. Nonfiction. Home economics. Food. Cooking in general, baking in particular. There was one book about bread specifically.

As she walked back to the door, she flipped through her book, glancing at the different pictures, all showing a variety of finished breads. It was water damaged and the cover was a little torn, but the contents of the book were intact. She allowed herself a smile.

Then she was interrupted by something that hadn't occurred in thirty-two years.

Contessa tripped.

She fell into a bookshelf, which fell into another one, and another, and all fell off the nearest balcony.

She picked herself up, somewhat startled to see it was now late afternoon instead of after midnight. She'd must have accidentally activated the teleporter during her fall, and it had sent her to . . . somewhere she didn't recognize. It looked like she and the shelves she'd taken down with her had ended up in the middle of a suburban cul de sac, miraculously and bizarrely untouched by Scion. Each perfectly painted white picket fence contained a perfectly maintained lawn, each inhabited by one beagle or one golden retriever.

Contessa's blood started to run cold as she looked at the inhabitants, none of whom seem to notice her. There were ten of them out, men waxing their sedans and boys tossing tennis balls for the dogs. No women or girls, but they would doubtlessly be inside, wearing dresses and skirts and cooking or sewing or something else suitably feminine.

She hadn't seen these particular people or this particular setup before, but she knew the type. She also knew she had to leave _right n--_

"A less graceful entrance than usual, Contessa," said a man from behind her. "What a _mess_ you've made."

That voice.

There were very few times she disagreed so fully with her agent's guidance, but its current refusal to recommend a course of action that involved screaming and running far, far away very, very fast _right now_ was one of them.

She turned and shrugged, smiling a little ruefully at the bespectacled, besweatered man sitting in a rocking chair on the one porch behind the one fence that didn't have a dog. "Well, Sleeper," she said, her power injecting a cheeriness she was currently incapable of feeling into her voice. " _Somebody's_ got to keep you on your toes."


	3. Contessa Takes a Nap

The problem with Teacher, Contessa reflected as she watched Sleeper make his way down towards the street she was standing in, was that he was a moron. Her fall had activated a set of coordinates previously stored in the teleporter, which meant that someone at Teacher's base had already used it to access Earth Zayin.

The problem with _Sleeper,_ aside from the fact she couldn't kill him, was that his power was always on. When he was "sleeping," it simply worked more slowly, on the order of weeks rather than fractions of a fraction of a second. Every moment she spent with him was a moment she lost some small part of herself, a part that was then drawn into his world or sets of worlds or—whatever. She couldn't remember how Alexandria described what, exactly, he did.

Alexandria had talked a lot.

Not important.

Because now, Sleeper would draw this conversation out as long as he could, and she would have to play along because leaving without his permission or trying to speed things along would wake him up.

Teacher's penchant for shit-disturbing was going to _cost_.

She would deal with him later.

"I brought books," she announced.

"Why, _thank_ you, Contessa." He looked at the pile of shelving and books at her feet. "I've always wanted to own one hundred ninety-four tomes on the use of herbaceous plants in landscape architecture."

Most of Contessa cringed. _That_ was what she had brought with her? Could she have picked a worse set of shelves to fall into? But the part of her that was on a path to getting out of here as fast as possible without waking him merely shrugged. "If you don't like your present, just say so. Sarcasm is rude and I can always get you a different one."

"Is it? Clearly you should have gone with Dewey Decimal Class 395 and not 716." He tapped the stem of his pipe on the top of the fence he stood behind, evaluating her. "You didn't mean to come here."

"Who would?"

"Turning your nose up at my Camazotz, are you? Now who's being rude?"

Contessa shrugged.

"Hmmm," Sleeper said. He was the sort to consciously say things like "hmmm," with the h at the beginning, or "tut tut" instead of just making the sound. The door to his house opened, and a dark-haired woman in her late twenties shambled out and came up to where they were. She was wearing a ridiculous skirt and blouse and she didn't have a face.

It was the copy of her he'd started when she'd first come to talk to him in 1998. She gave it a once over—pink socks with lace, why?—and looked back at him.

He was obviously disappointed in her lack of reaction. The other Contessa disappeared with a pop, getting squidgy blobs of flesh all over the place. Contessa flicked a bit of spleen off her sleeve, and in the doing brought the book she was holding into Sleeper's field of vision.

"That book," Sleeper said. "The one that _isn't_ about gardening."

She moved it behind her back. "It's not important."

He reached over the fence, hand opened expectantly. "If it's not important, then you won't mind me taking a look at it."

Contessa frowned at him, feigning hesitation and reluctance. Then she handed it over and he started to page through it.

"'Make tasty bagels in a New York minute!' 'Cinnamon buns to roll over and die for!' 'See your way to making these delectable Saint Lucy's eyes!'" He quoted. Each exclamation point made Contessa feel a little sillier. "I confess I don't fully understand your power, but I think I know enough to know you don't need a book like this."

"Everyone has hobbies."

He shook his head, ponderously. " _Nearly_ everyone has hobbies. I don't think you do. I certainly don't believe you would have been be so intent on collecting this that you accidentally came here for the sake of a _recipe_. What do you really want with this?"

"Page 30," She said, watching as he flipped towards the front of the book and read the header: _Basic Italian Loaf_. "You're overthinking this."

"First you break in, making a mess in the process. Then you insult my literary taste and my home. Now you're lying to me. I think that warrants a punishment."

"I think you've done enough," she said. "Showing me your poor taste in socks was pretty harsh."

"I'm going to keep this," he said. "I'm _also_ going to let you go."

Step twenty-two required some response to his dramatic pause, so she raised her eyebrows.

"On the condition you return here within six months. We then compare notes on how well we can read cookbooks. A baking contest, one loaf of bread each. If you lose, I'll take you. If you win, I'll give her back to you and let you go."

Contessa knew the answer to the question, but she still had to ask. "Let who go?"

" _Whom_ ," Sleeper said. "And _Fortuna_."

Even though she knew it was coming, the _tear_ she felt through her mind came as a physical blow. She stumbled back, regained her balance before the books at her feet could trip her. The girl that materialized in front of her in the same instant didn't have a power to help her keep her footing, and she fell into Sleeper's fence.

"Most people are built around one or two central points, a key trait or a key memory," Sleeper said, smugly and unnecessarily. He liked monologuing. "Ascertaining what _both_ of those are when dealing with parahumans is _trivial_. All I have to look for is _trigger_."

Contessa did as the penultimate step dictated and stared at the copy of her younger self for a moment. She was wearing the dress and boots she'd had on when she'd abandoned her uncle, and her face—this one _had_ a face—very clearly showed the confusion and terror she'd felt before she'd been able to understand.

Sleeper, on the other hand, was smiling. "Don't worry about her. She'll be happy."

"Okay," Contessa said. "Can I go now?"

Sleeper's smile disappeared. "You _may_ ," he said sternly.

Contessa made sure she'd teleported back to Bet's New York before she rolled her eyes.

The sun was just coming up.

She spent about twenty seconds wondering whether she should start breaking into bars and emptying every last bottle of whiskey in the city, but that probably wouldn't help. It took a disproportionate amount of alcohol for her to get drunk, and it never lasted long enough. She chose instead to make her way to a portal and find a café that was open at six or so in the morning.

As she went, she considered her situation.

She was unwilling to go back to Teacher's base just now. She needed some time to think about why he was so interested in Sleeper, why he hadn't told her, and what she was going to do about it.

She _also_ needed to think of a way to kill Sleeper before the baking contest happened.

But not yet. Contessa was tired, more than she should be. Dealing with Sleeper was draining in more than one way.

With the tiredness came a dull, throbbing headache. Her implants were punishing her for having gone too long without time for maintenance. If she continued to push herself without sleep, or failed to get enough sleep, it'd evolve into a blinding, nausea-inducing migraine. Within a few hours, she'd be unable to do much of anything but curl up and vomit.

This was a feature, not a bug, of the Tinktertech she'd had implanted in her when she was twenty-one. The particular tech that had changed and regulated her metabolism and sleeping patterns was generally self-maintaining, but it still needed _time_ , about three to six hours a week, to accomplish that. Alexandria had pointed out they needed some way to make sure they couldn't make her push past the tech's limits and accidentally kill herself; the Doctor had suggested the best way to avoid succumbing to temptation was make it physically impossible to give in.

She'd agreed with the logic.

Then she'd gotten her first artificial migraine.

By then, of course, it had been too late to change her mind.

She manipulated the cashier into giving her a small bottle of orange juice for free and took a seat relatively close to the door, making absolutely certain not to trip.

Then she thought about another consequence of her side-trip to Zayin. No recipe book.

And now she was averse to going anywhere else on the map Tattletale had made for her. Contessa knew it was impossible for her to end back up on Zayin if she used her power to avoid it, but the association between going to the library and having her brain eaten alive was too strong for her to ignore.

She sighed a little and took a pen out of her pocket.

_I want to know the steps for making bread well_.

This was a little bit of a failure, but she would accept that if her alternatives were to completely rely on her power to make the bread or exposing herself to a library again.

Her power gave her the recipe she was looking for, and she wrote it out on a napkin.

"What are you doing here?"

Contessa glanced up. A man in a polo and slacks stood near her table. He held a large latte in one hand, and he was clearly torn between the desire to upbraid her (because evidently everyone left alive knew her face and had at least one problem with her) and the realization he'd just outed himself as a cape.

"I know it's you," she said, before he could make the situation worse. "Just sit."

"How?" Chevalier asked. "Oh. Right. Why are you in New York?"

"Something personal," she said once he'd seated himself. "Nothing serious, unless you have questions? I know Tattletale already contacted you about what I told her."

"Yes," Chevalier said. "Yes, I have some questions for you. How do you know there could be twenty Endbringers? What in _hell_ made you think sitting on that information was a good idea?"

She opened her mouth to tell him about the superweapons she'd seen, and—

Blank.

"One moment," she said.

She attempted to remember anything about her trigger vision.

Blank.

She attempted to remember her uncle's face.

Blank.

She attempted to remember meeting the Doctor.

Blank.

She went backwards, trying to remember any specific incidents from her childhood.

Blank.

She went forwards, and the first thing she could clearly picture was killing Lamar.

Before that . . . Nothing. Not even the fog she associated with her power not working. She knew things should be there, she even had an idea of _what_ should be there, but no emotions or details came to mind.

Fucking Sleeper. Fucking Teacher and fucking Sleeper and fucking not using her power and fucking tripping and _fucking Sleeper_.

"To answer your question, Cauldron caught a glimpse of the plan Scion and his partner had to destroy the earth. It included twenty superweapons that bore some similarities to the Endbringers, but seemed to be significantly less powerful and more quiescent. More importantly, have you considered nuking Sleeper from orbit?"

He gave her a funny look. "Obviously not when he was on Bet. Now that he's on his own earth, he's not much of a threat. And Zayin doesn't have any launch platforms."

"If I had access to Doormaker through Valkyrie, I could put existing satellites directly in orbit above Zayin," she said.

"The only satellites with missiles we have left are from Dragon, and even those subsystems have too strong a moral code to just launch orbital bombardments at the drop of a hat."

"I could create a patch that would fix that," Contessa said helpfully. "I'm not a Tinker, but I can do some Tinker work in a pinch."

He looked at her incredulously.

"It was just an idea," she said. If she heard a little bit of sulkiness in her voice, it was because of her building headache, and not because she was actually being petulant.

"You really are broken, aren't you?"

Was everyone in this fucking dimension going to ask her stupid questions? Contessa leaned forward. "I'll tell you a secret, Noah," she said in a theatrically low voice.

He couldn't help but mirror her body language. "What?"

She dropped her voice to a stage whisper. "There's an alien parasite in my brain."

Chevalier snapped back in his chair, clearly annoyed.

"I'm _less_ broken than you, really. My power wasn't ever meant to be distributed to humans, so it's not primed to reward me for fighting and destroying things. One of the many benefits of Cauldron's method of producing capes."

"Minus the eighty-five percent death and distortion rate, of course."

"Minus that," Contessa agreed. "The downside of not being meant for distribution to humans."

He didn't seem to know what to say to that, and so they sat in silence, sipping their respective beverages, until Contessa's headache spiked. It transitioned from an annoying ache to a concerning throb, which she generally took as a signal to find a safe place to sleep. She folded the napkin and put it into her pocket.

"Leaving?" Chevalier asked.

"I don't have a lot of time to spare. I'll resurface if you need any information. And you really should do something about Sleeper. Very soon."

Contessa chose to go back to the clairvoyant's apartment, ascertained that nobody would come there to attack her, and collapsed onto the couch.

The next thing she knew, Raj was poking her in the shoulder with a wooden spoon.

She suppressed the urge to snap at him. He knew he wasn't supposed to wake her up, which meant something important was happening.

Probably.

There had been a handful of times that he'd interrupted her rest for reasons only he categorized as important. She hoped this wasn't another case of _but I don't want to go to bed_ or _why do you wear boy clothes tell me now_ or, her personal favorite, _Number Man stole my popcorn_.

(Number Man had made the popcorn for himself, and Raj had shown up to collect it because he could see it, and therefore it was his.)

"What the hell is _she_ doing here?"

Four blotchy shapes loomed behind Raj. Contessa blinked, trying to focus on them in spite of the stabbing pain behind her eyes. She failed, and reverted to her power. _I want to know who's here and why._

Some of Faultline's Crew was here to recruit Raj. Faultline, to make the pitch. Newter, who was his age, who knew what it was like not to be able to touch anybody, and who was also _super cool_. Shamrock, because she'd been kept as one of Cauldron's experiments. Labyrinth, to emphasize that the drawbacks of his power wouldn't separate him from the rest of the team.

Not a bad idea, all things considered.

_Want me with them_ , Raj informed her, having switched to whacking the back of her right hand with the spoon.

"Please stop that," she told him.

He did not stop. _Yes? No?_

"It's up to you," she said. "You'd do more work for the Wardens, once they learn how to talk to you. But you'd like it better with Faultline."

_YES NO_

"It is pretty good," someone—red hair, Seven Seven Seven, Shamrock, right—said. "Except when amoral psychopaths sneak up behind you and smash your face into doors."

Contessa stared at her. Where had that come from?

_YES NO YES N_

She flipped her hand over and grabbed the spoon. "I asked you to stop."

"I don't know," Newter said. "I kind of liked watching you get hit."

She tossed the utensil in the direction of his voice, but without her power to guide it, it went wide.

"You look out of it," Faultline said. "Why? You hungover?"

"Trick," Shamrock said. "She's not really impaired. Trying to make us underestimate her, maybe trying to provoke us into attacking her."

Contessa didn't think she'd be able to wrap her head around that logic even if her implants weren't plucking her nerves like so many lyre strings, so she ignored it. "Could you people come back after I've gone? Or go somewhere else for this conversation?"

"This was a waste of time," Newter said. "She's obviously in control here, if he's asking her for advice. They probably made him retarded on purpose."

Raj understood more of the remark than perhaps Newter had expected. He turned and advanced on the orange man, obviously intending to use his ability offensively. Contessa suddenly had a vision of how badly his clairvoyance would react to the hallucinogen in Newter's sweat and threw herself out of the couch.

"Don't touch him!" Contessa shouted, slapping the clairvoyant's hand away before it could make contact with Newter's chest. She reeled from the sudden glimpse into hundreds of dimensions, recovering in time just to perceive Newter locking his hand around _her_ wrist.

In the split second she had before everything got very pretty, Contessa thought

_Fuck_

and

_Path—_


	4. Contessa Gets Dressed

When Contessa came to herself, she realized she had a problem.

Several problems, actually.

For one, she was tied and handcuffed to a metal chair that was bolted to the floor.

For another, her feet were stuck in a basin of hardening concrete.

And she wasn't wearing any pants.

At least her headache had dissipated.

Faultline was sitting on another chair about eight feet away. Her finger was resting on the bright orange trigger of a neon green and yellow plastic gun. A boy with glowing hair and violet smoke coming out of his nose and mouth stood on her right. Dinah Alcott was sitting on a table to her left.

"Is any of this necessary?" she asked.

"Yes. Do you not remember what you did to my team?"

"Vaguely," Contessa said, supremely annoyed with herself. Outside of her old routine, outside of the protection hiding in another dimension afforded, and outside of the Doctor prodding her, she was getting careless with her questions, and this absurdity was the result. "I had to get a new hat. Why are you menacing me with a toy?"

"It's a squirt gun," Faultline said. "We've had you out of it for about six hours. Newter used that time to drink water. A _lot_ of water."

Oh.

_Oh._

"I see," Contessa said. "What do you want?"

"I want you not to hurt or kill my team, now or ever," Faultline said. "And Dinah wants to talk to you. I understand you deal in favors, so we can pay you that way."

"I've never killed for personal reasons, and there's no reason for me to start now." She looked down at her bare kneecaps. "Or there wasn't, before you stole my clothes."

Faultline pointed to the table Alcott was sitting on. "Your things are here. We're not trying to make you angry. We're only trying to delay you. Precog says that the longer you stay here, the more likely we'll live."

"You're missing something," Contessa said, "Ms. Alcott, what are the odds your team will survive the next thirty minutes?"

"Forty-six point three four nine percent," she replied.

"What are the odds _I_ kill your team in the next thirty minutes?"

"Three point zero seven six percent."

"You said we'd have fifty-fifty odds this way," Faultline hissed at her precog. "Why did the number go down?"

"I already told you," Contessa said. "I'm annoyed about your stealing my clothes. Annoyed enough I'll take you up on that offer. One favor in exchange for not killing you all now."

"What is that?"

"Kill Sleeper sometime before July."

"Are you still high?" Scrub shouted. "We can't do that! Nobody can!"

"Kill Sleeper before July," Contessa said again, "Or we repeat Madison, except for the part where I pulled my punches."

Faultline and Alcott exchanged glances. Alcott shook her head. "I think we'll take being killed by you over being killed by Sleeper, which is what would happen if we attacked him," Faultline said.

"You're wildly underestimating what I mean by _punches_. I could, for instance, kidnap Labyrinth and turn her over to Teacher. I'm sure his power would help her with the drawbacks of hers, most effectively on a permanent basis—"

"Shut up," Faultline growled. "Keep your psychosis to yourself or we _will_ put you out and kill you. Taking our chances with your employers—Teacher, I take it?—hunting us down would be preferable to listening to you."

"You crazy bitch," Scrub said. He was clenching his fists and the smoke coming out of him was increasing in volume, and changing to white. He'd snap soon. Standard protectiveness, or a crush on his teammate?

Contessa smiled. "I'm demonstrably not psychotic. See, I have enough connection to reality that I know you'd want periodic updates on how she's doing, maybe some occasional supervised visits . . ."

Scrub lost control just as Faultline fired her toy gun. He aimed a blast at her face, but it ended up going toward her ankles. A third of the concrete anchoring her feet and two of the chair legs vanished, and she threw herself to the left, both avoiding Faultline's shot and bringing the remainder of the chair to the floor.

"Scrub, it's okay! Calm down!" Alcott said while Contessa extracted herself from the mess of ropes and the chair. "I'm mostly sure she didn't mean it. Breathe deeply, stop firing—"

Faultline shot her weapon again, and Contessa brought her feet up to shield herself. "Incoming attack," she said, slamming her feet back to the ground in order to dislodge the rest of the concrete. "You need to call Gregor and tell him to evacuate the building. Forty seconds from now will be too late for your team."

Faultline was forced to abandon her attack in favor of contacting her crew, leaving Contessa free to finish slipping her cuffs and start pulling her suit back on. "Gregor? Code red. Meet at rally point baker."

Contessa had just finished reclaiming her pants and socks when the door crashed open and a man much taller than he should be strode in. He was on fire.

He looked around the room and his eye came to rest on her. "You," he growled. Scales erupted from his skin.

_Me?_ Contessa thought as she fastened her cuff links.

She'd made him trigger, years ago in a fight not worth remembering. _She'd_ obviously left quite an impression; just seeing her was enough to accelerate his transformation.

Some people and their grudges.

"For fuck's sake!" Faultline shouted. "Is there anyone you _haven't_ pissed off? Dinah, run! Eustace, cover our retreat!"

Contessa dodged a fireball he shot her and put her jacket on. Her fedora was missing, which was unfortunate, but less of a concern than Lung's rapid approach. _Path: persuade him to just be grateful for the power._

Her power stuttered, alternating rapidly between zero and several tens of thousands of steps. She tended to interpret that as something like, "Are you _kidding_ me?"

He wanted her blood.

Fuck him, then.

She threw herself to the ground in order to avoid a swipe from one of his claws. She rolled and came to a stop just by the handcuffs she'd dropped earlier. She spun and threw them at Scrub's ankles. He tripped and a flash of white light eliminated every part of Lung that was beneath his ribcage, as well as a sizeable chunk of the warehouse floor, from reality.

She leapt to her feet and chased after Faultline, who had turned back to collect Scrub. Contessa collected Faultline's cell phone and weapon, then returned to the pit Lung had fallen into. She peeked over the edge and pumped the remaining contents of the squirt gun into his eyes. He roared in protest, but slumped forward after a few seconds.

For a moment, Contessa wondered whether she should just kill him. She could get Scrub to take his head off or get Foil to kill him before he woke up. But then, he was useful against Endbringers . . .

She realized she was already dialing Legend's home phone from Faultline's cell. "It's Contessa. I've disabled Lung. I'll leave this line open so you can trace it. I suggest getting Valkyrie to move him to another earth, one that doesn't have a portal to Bet. I'm leaving now, so hurry." Then she put the phone down on the ground next to the hole, ignoring the angry Legend noises emanating from the speaker, and set about putting as much distance between herself and Lung as possible.

There was something else she needed to do, but she couldn't remember what it was.

_Path: think of things I want to remember._

She realized her mistake after step four, think of the fit Alexandria threw after the Doctor told her she wasn't allowed to boss Contessa and the Number Man around.

_Path: think of mission-relevant things that came to my attention in the past twenty minutes_.

Only two things came to mind, and one of them was to take steps to ensure that she never again lost her clothes.

As for the other . . . She found an apartment building with easy roof access where she could wait without being disturbed. Contessa sat down, letting her feet dangle over the edge of the rooftop, and watched the city. She didn't have an opinion about New York, but she knew that people like Alexandria and Legend—and Weaver, now that she thought about it—had considered it to be the center of the world. She could see something of that, now, in the obvious energy with which its inhabitants were approaching reconstruction.

From this angle, where she couldn't see the conflict and pettiness and squalor, humanity was  nearly worth the trouble she'd gone for it.

Dinah Alcott arrived about two hours later. "I'm sorry for your wait," she said. "It took me a while to narrow the location down. I hardly have any questions left."

"You won't need them," Contessa said.

"I want to talk about Taylor. I know what you told the Wardens—"

Contessa interrupted her. "Counteroffer. We talk about how you will never talk about Taylor again. I know you're feeling guilty," she said. "Don't. Also, stop thinking about pushing me off the roof, because it won't work."

"Are you going to try to tell me I'm not to blame? _Her_ friends know it's my fault, I'm pretty sure Imp is harassing me when she's in town—"

"Of course it's your fault," Contessa said. "That's not the point. The point is that you have to ignore it. Accept it. Don't try to _fiddle_ with how I've arranged things."

"And if I _don't_ accept what you've done, what then? You'll kill me?"

"I'm thinking I'll shoot you in the head. It's up to you whether you want to believe that's lethal."

"Your power infuriates me," Alcott said. "I know the future I want _could_ exist, but I can't bring it about. You can, but you won't. She was—we weren't friends, but we both meant a lot to each other. I ruined her and you won't even let us try and fix things now that it's over. At least tell me why."

"It's not over. It won't ever be over as far as she's concerned. Right now, she's dead, and everyone's okay with that. But people know who you are and what your power is, so if _you_ start looking, that gives them ideas. Maybe someone will find her DNA and clone her. She won't be Skitter, she'll be Khepri. Think about that power under the control of someone like Teacher or the Faerie Queen."

"But if she's alive—"

"So what then? People would want to track her down and hurt her because they're angry, or maybe they want to control her so they can use her as a symbol, make a bid for power. Or maybe nobody would find her, but the fact you're looking is enough to start rumors. You spawn panic and undermine what we've built so far. Just imagine what the Simurgh could do with a bunch of paranoid Khepri cultists."

"What _could_ the Simurgh do with a bunch of paranoid Khepri cultists?"

"I have no idea," Contessa admitted, "but it would be really bad. You see that, don't you? People like us can't afford to indulge our feelings, because _everyone else_ feels the consequences."

"I really fucking hate you."

"I know. But I also know how to choose the best possible outcome. I'm not going to let anyone use her, even accidentally. I hope you'll think about it and see I'm right."

Alcott laughed bitterly. "I have to do what you want me to. Doesn't mean I have to like it. Fuck you, I hope that eighty-nine point four two percent of your dying badly comes to pass _soon_. I'll find her after that."

She left before Contessa could formulate a response.

Contessa shrugged and redirected her attention to the skyline, which was now backlit by a sunset. She considered the conversation. That had been the most she'd said at one time without using her power since before Hero had died.

It could have gone better, but at least Alcott wouldn't become the prophet of the second coming of Taylor Hebert. On the whole . . . She would count this as a win. More of a win than what her baking efforts had yielded so far, anyway.

"Door, please," she said.

No door opened.

"I know he's not there," she said to the empty air. "I just wanted you to notice me. You remember how to find Sleeper, right? Tell the Wardens if he does anything weird."

_Weird_ for Sleeper was a relative term. When he was asleep, he made and remade horrific little worlds with the people he'd consumed. When he was awake, things were . . . different. The clairvoyant would notice the change and report it to the Wardens.

"I'm going to leave New York for a while. We'll talk as soon as I can come back."

She stood up and asked herself about the whereabouts of the rest of Faultline's Crew. Gregor and Shamrock were occupied, Newter was with a couple of girls, Spitfire had gone on a walk with Labyrinth and Scrub, and Faultline was passed out in a nearby studio apartment, which Contessa promptly found and broke into.

A fedora sat on the coffee table. She picked it up. It was her own; her knife was underneath it.

A trophy?

Paths to ruining Faultline, professionally and personally, came to mind. Contessa could take the cell phone under Faultline's pillow and empty all their accounts, frame them for a double-cross, or destroy their hard-earned reputation. She could kill Gregor and let Shamrock's grief tear the team apart, or she could arrange for Faultline to sustain debilitating brain damage—

They were old patterns of thought, ones she'd developed in service of keeping Cauldron secret. Discredit, disable, destroy.

She returned her knife to its place and donned her hat. Then she approached Faultline's bed, using her power to remove the various weapons tucked in and around the bed without waking the sleeping mercenary.

Out of sheer pettiness, she pulled Faultline's sweatpants off and hid them in the microwave.

While she was in the kitchen, Contessa found something she decided she was going to keep. She scooped it up and returned to the main room, set her prize on the coffee table, and returned to her sleeping host's bedside. She leaned over the bed and touched her index finger to Faultline's nose.

"Beep," she said.

Faultline startled awake. She shattered the bottle of scotch she'd fallen asleep with and split Contessa's watch with her power.

Contessa straightened. Faultline was still thrashing around, searching for weapons that weren't there.

"Should've—killed you—"

"Obviously. But you didn't, and now you have my attention." She beamed at Faultline. "You've realized by now that I said what I did to make Scrub lose control, of course."

"Huh? I have?" Faultline asked.

"Yes. I think destroying stable parahuman organizations is unwise, so don't worry about that. I do want you to think about destroying Sleeper. The Wardens have written him off because he's alone on Zayin, but Teacher is trying to build an alliance with him. Making overtures, giving him supplies, feeding him _people_ , even."

"What? Why? Why don't you stop him?"

"I haven't looked into that yet," Contessa said. "But I'd feel much more comfortable about the long term if I knew someone with intelligence was considering countermeasures. I'm sure the clairvoyant will provide you some intelligence on his actions, provided only you approach him. I will arrange suitable payment for you simply to think about the problem."

"Fine," Faultline said with obvious exasperation. "Yes. I'll think about it."

Contessa bestowed a smile on her and turned to leave. On her way out, she collected the appliance that had caught her attention earlier.

Faultline spluttered. "Why the hell are you taking my bread machine?"

Contessa didn't hear the question; she was too busy focused on thinking about how easy her quest would be now that she had an appliance specifically for making bread.


	5. Contessa Loses Her Hat

The Number Man lives in a world of truth and beauty. He sees things as they truly are, free from the delusions and agendas humanity foolishly attempts to impose on an indifferent reality.

All he has to do is _focus_ , and he can leverage this knowledge to cut through delusions to achieve results. He can build empires, destroy enemies in combat, or fashion the most exquisite structures from the most fragile of components—

The sound of a clearing throat brought him back to reality.

Someone was behind him.

He didn't look. He dropped the deck of cards he was holding, extrapolated the intruder's location based on the sound, drew one of the knives he'd taken to carrying, and threw it over his shoulder.

 _Then_ he turned to look, drawing and raising his handgun in the same motion.

Contessa stood there. She'd caught the blade between one thumb and forefinger, the point half a centimeter from her eye. She tilted her head a little and quirked a singed eyebrow.

He lowered his weapon. "You're alive."

She tossed the knife back to him. "I am. Thank you." She looked around, taking in the nine-foot tall towers of cards he was building around the perimeter of his office. "I see you've kept yourself occupied."

He shrugged. "Taking over this area was trivial, and my clones have been handling most of the operations since then. Keeps them too busy to pull whiskers off cats or old men. You?"

"I've been working with Teacher. Thought I should keep you away from him."

"What changed?"

She waved a hand at the ceiling. The Simurgh.

"Is it wise to change your behavior because of her?"

"Who knows?" Contessa said. "Tattletale thinks she's trying to make or control more Endbringers by cloning Eidolon. I can think of few worse situations."

The reference to Tattletale annoyed him. He reached for a change of subject. "What happened to your eyebrows?"

A comically furtive look stole across her face. "I, er, had a run-in with Lung yesterday," she said, sounding far more casual than she did while she was actually being casual. "I triggered him all those years ago and he was still upset."

"Some people have long memories and poor judgment," he remarked. He wondered whether she had the first idea of how bad a liar she was on her own.

Or maybe she was setting him up for a poker loss four or five months down the line.

"The phrase _poor judgment_ is apropos given what you've allowed to happen to your face," she said. She closed the distance between them and pressed a few items into his hands.

A folded razor, a shaving brush, and a tin of shaving soap.

He could take a hint.

"I'm going to shower," she told him.

He grabbed a hanger from his hall closet and followed her to his bathroom, where he hung up the bits of clothing that Contessa was throwing over the top of the curtain.

"Since when do you wear suspenders?" he asked.

"Since sixteen hours ago, when I determined that they can prevent people from stealing my pants."

"I'm sorry, but are you trying to say you were in danger of someone stealing your pants?"

"I'm saying nothing of the kind. As you can see, I have positive control over all my clothing." A pair of boxer briefs hit him in the face, punctuating her point. "The suspenders are but one of a variety of measures I have begun to employ to ensure that continues to be the case."

She turned the water on, which would drown out any reply he cared to make.

The Number Man wasn't sure what to make of that. He noticed she didn't actually deny the allegation, but he couldn't imagine a set of circumstances (short of an extremely bizarre Endbringer attack) under which she _could_ lose her pants. He added the suspenders to a mental list of confusing things, along with her claim that Lung had burnt her eyebrows, he'd probably get a clearer answer on later.

In the meantime, he filled the sink with hot water and prepared to shave. "What happened after we last spoke?"

"Teacher came through our base after I was able to get back in," she said. "He told me about Weaver. Shot Weaver, went back to his pocket dimension, stayed there for the most part."

He couldn't talk without interrupting his shave, so he managed a quick grunt, knowing she would understand his question.

"He wants to tap multiple agents at once, string powers together. Potentially useful, probably dangerous. I found out he's also deliberately strengthening Sleeper—and, worse, that he'd taken steps to prevent me from learning about it."

The Number Man lowered his razor. "I hadn't realized he was stupid."

"He's not. He simply can't help the megalomania. Hardly any of us can, when it comes down to it. Neither the truce we've established nor the fact we spread ourselves throughout so many worlds is going to stop us from reverting to type. We _will_ start to fight again."

"Mm," he responded.

"I considered pulling or pushing the Bet-centric parahumans into one of two camps, the Wardens and Teacher. The balance of power would discourage them from all-out war and keep conflicts relatively small and contained. Now I don't think it will work."

He washed the residue lather off his face. "You think he's not stable enough."

"He has an obsession with the Simurgh that does not bode well for the long-term survival prospects of his organization, even with my influence." Contessa shut the water off and poked her head out from behind the curtain. "You need a haircut. Go get a chair."

The Number Man didn't use chairs as a general rule, but the suite had come with a set of wooden bar stools he stored in the kitchen. He retrieved one of these and returned to the bathroom, where Contessa, now in her slacks and white undershirt, stood pulling her damp hair back into a ponytail.

He sat on the stool and Contessa reached over his shoulder and undid the top button of his shirt, then tucked a hand towel into the top of his collar. She ran a hand through his hair. "You're going gray," she observed.

"The clones. Herding five adolescents tailored to Jack's preferences is _impossible_. The Siberian tries to help, but he has his own problems." He sighed. She didn't respond, focused as she was on trimming the front and top of his hair with a pair of scissors. "One of these days they're going to figure out where I keep the control switch. One of these days I'm going to _let_ them just so they can kill me and I won't have to bother with them anymore."

"They're sadists, aren't they? I suspect they would just take you with them on their rampage. They'd keep you around so they could judge by your reactions what bothered you the most and do more of that. And they'd take good care of you so they could inflict themselves on you until you died of old age."

He groaned.

"Everybody left would notice," Contessa mused. "Everybody left would remember them. But nobody would know what you did for Cauldron. Philip Jameson's legacy: a gaggle of rowdy Harbingers."

The thought was almost physically painful. "Whatever you want, I will give it to you so you'll stop."

"You'll give me whatever I want anyway," she pointed out. She switched from scissors to clippers. "I refer you to the events of the seventeenth of November, 1987."

The events in question stood out very clearly in his mind, but she hadn't been there. "Don't you mean the nineteenth? That was when you recruited me."

"I said what I meant."

He tried to look up so he could see her face and judge whether she was telling the truth or simply trying to get a rise out of him, but her fingers were already braced against the movement, keeping his head in place. "If you move, you'll cock up the fade and I'll have to give you a high and tight. That would be repulsive, so don't."

He was forced to be content with spluttering in the direction of his navel. "Are—are you saying _you_ put me in that dress?!"

"I set the events that led to your donning a ball gown in motion, yes."

"No. I distinctly remember Jacob talking me into it. Not you. It's not the sort of thing I'd forget."

"You know how my power had that strange feedback with his? I was testing to see whether I could set things up to steer him in a given direction. Alexandria determined that the answer was 'yes, but not really, so knock it off and get back to work, Contessa.'"

The Number Man found himself more in sympathy with Alexandria than he'd ever had occasion to be. "I don't see why the direction in question needed to involve taffeta."

"That particular shade of gray set off your eyes just so, and I was a lot more human back then. Give a teenager power, things happen." She brushed his neck off and removed the towel, and her hand came to a rest on his shoulder. "There, now you look like yourself."

Was there any way he could try to turn this back on her? He considered possible avenues of attack while he put his glasses back on and evaluated his reflection. "I always gave Jacob credit for the whole affair because he responded so enthusiastically," he said at last. "Even with the bloodstains, he still—"

Her grip on his shoulder went painfully tight. "I'm aware," she said icily.

"Still human enough for a touch of jealousy?" he suggested.

She scoffed. "I am not jealous of Jack Slash or of some schoolboy romance I put an end to over twenty-five years ago."

"Of course. I can tell how completely you are at peace with it by the way you're cutting off circulation to my right arm."

Suddenly her head snapped up. "Oh. It's time."

He instinctively followed her gaze to the ceiling, then chided himself. It was silly to act as though he could see what she did. "For what?" he asked.

She pulled on his shoulder, spinning him around to face her. "You to shut up," she informed him. Her lips pressed against his, and—

"Fractals," he murmured. "Do you know why I always see fractals, at the end?"

"Let me ask my power." She waited a moment. "Yes, I see. It's because you're a gigantic nerd. Roll over."

Stupid questions yielded stupid answers, he supposed. He rolled over onto his side. Contessa snuggled up behind him and wrapped an arm around his midsection. "You should come back with me. I know you're invested in this area, but—"

"Okay," he said, interrupting her. He'd decided a long time ago not to argue with Contessa; it was easier just to agree the moment she brought up an idea. She'd never proposed anything he _didn't_ want. "We'll work it out tomorrow."

He was almost asleep when she spoke again. "What do the fractals look like?"

"I'll draw some for you later," he promised.

When he woke up, he was alone in bed. Considering how little she slept, it wasn't surprising. He got dressed and followed the smell of cooking food out of his bedroom and into the kitchen, where Contessa stood over the stove, staring blankly at a frying pan.

"Path to omelet?" he asked.

"Not exactly," she replied.

He nodded. She had likely narrowed the parameters from _omelet_ to something like _ideal morning after omelet for Philip using readily available ingredients_.

He processed another smell, that of burning food. He looked at the white bread machine she'd brought with her. Wisps of smoke curled up from beneath the lid.

"Path to omelet and toast?" he offered, hesitantly.

She blinked and turned to look at him. "No?"

"Then what—"

An enormous, transdimensional double helix in space flooded his awareness.

 _Destination_ , suggested one side of the helix.

 _Agreement_ , emitted the other side.

 _Not this again_ , thought the Number Man, and waited for the vision to subside.

"Trigger," he said, before he could forget. Contessa was already on her feet. She had her knife in one hand and a cleaver in the other. He picked up a chef's knife and a skillet and took up a defensive position at her back. "Thoughts?" he asked.

"I'm blind to whoever it is," she said. "But they have to be close. My instinct is to assume that your clones were playing with someone and got carried away—"

He shuddered.

"But my power says that all five of them are sitting downstairs plotting the destruction of your house of cards. They seem to be content restricting themselves to tormenting you."

He looked around, surveying the hundred eighty degree swathe of apartment that was his responsibility. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until he noticed bread machine starting to rock back and forth, slowly at first, and then faster as it picked up momentum. Finally it flopped over on to its side.

Before he could process what he was seeing, the lid popped open and a blob of half-formed dough oozed out, slid over the side of the counter, and landed at his feet.

The Number Man reflexively stomped on it.

The dough slid out from beneath his shoe and reformed, now at 133% of the size it started out, and scuttled across the floor.

"What," he said.

Contessa threw the cleaver at it, splitting it nearly in half. A crusty ridge emerged from the resulting crevice, covering the injury and again increasing the monster's size. It flattened itself and squeezed through the space beneath his front door and the floor.

"Breaker and Brute with regeneration," he said. "Was something like this how you actually burned your eyebrows off?"

"They're not completely gone," she said defensively.

That was a _yes_ , then, he thought as he popped the screen out of his kitchen window. She owed him an explanation for this. "Beside the point, Contessa! You take the stairs, I'll see if I can't head it off through here."

He jumped through the window and placed one hand on the gutter to control his descent. He turned his landing into a roll that ended with him breaking into a sprint and rounded the corner of his building.

Somehow Contessa had gotten there first, _and_ she was now completely dressed, _and_ she had his revolver in her hand. She was looking at a storm drain.

"I can't see it at all," she said as he drew near. "I shot it, but it only got bigger, and then it disappeared down there. Now my ears are ringing. I hate guns. I wonder if I should have tried talking to it instead."

Considering that she'd told him her power didn't work on it, he wondered what she would have said. "Halt, monster! Submit to examination and destruction"? He relieved her of his pistol. "What did you put in there, if I may ask?"

"Things that make bread when properly combined at the right temperature for the correct amount of time," she snapped.

"Well," he said tentatively, "You may have done something wrong."

Contessa just stared morosely at the drain. "I don't know how. I don't even know _what_ happened. I just, I just wanted—something of my own, without this damnable _thing_ in my head . . . "

One tendril of the bread-monster emerged from the drain, engulfed her fedora, and vanished again.

"Muh," Contessa said.

His need to express his feelings trumped his common sense. "It would seem the superpowered inhuman abomination you created in my kitchen has a sense of style," he said. "Or humor. Outstanding."

Contessa let out an inarticulate scream of rage.

Then she began shrieking imprecations at the drain, the monster, her power, and, for reasons that were unclear to him, Sleeper. She worked her way through English, detoured at length to German and Russian and then Arabic, ran through the romance languages, shifted into what he was pretty sure was her native language, then returned to English for the finale.

"Do you feel better?" he asked, a minute or so after she'd wound down.

She shook her head. When she spoke, it was in a whisper. "I only stopped because my throat hurts."

Someone sniggered. The Number Man glanced over his shoulder and saw two of his clones.

Contessa spun on her heel and glared at the Harbingers. "If either or any of you so much as _think_ of having an opinion on this or _anything else ever again_ , I will puncture your eyeballs with your own fucking teeth," she snarled.

The clones backed away. Efficiently. The Number Man willed himself to stay in place. Retreating would only draw her attention. And it would be futile.

"I have tea," he said. "Should soothe the pain. As for our problem, we'll need answers on how something like a nonhuman trigger could have happened. This strikes me as a dangerous precedent."

She nodded and set off back toward his suite. He followed in respectful silence.

His omelet was on fire.


	6. Contessa Contributes to a Potluck

The Number Man stared at the sign over the grungy entryway he was about to step through with a disapproving frown. "Tony's Pizza and Subs?" he asked.

"I've already stopped here once," Contessa replied. "Doing so again will foster the illusion that I'm predictable and that will make the Wardens feel a little better about their inability to contain me. Go get us a booth. They'll be here soon."

A few moments later, a woman arrived with a teen in tow. Miss Militia was meant to be intimidating, she supposed, with the automatic weapon at ready in her hands. The blonde teen slouching beside her simply had her hands in her pockets and she was glowering at Contessa.

"We're not really sure we should allow this," Miss Militia said as they drew near.

"Thank you for giving me the benefit of the doubt," Contessa replied, her power nudging her in the direction of politeness.

"I'm not sure we would have," Miss Militia continued, "but Weld surprisingly put in a good word for you."

Contessa did her best to look guileless, although she doubted even her agent could pull that off.

Miss Militia sighed. "You have one hour," she said before turning to leave.

Riley piped up. "You're paying."

"Okay," Contessa said, and held the door open. "We're in the corner booth."

"Harbinger!" Riley said, lighting up for a few seconds before realizing she probably should not look so happy to see another member of the Slaughterhouse Nine. She attempted to regain her glower.

He gave a pained smile. "Number Man, please. Or Mr. Jameson."

"His name is Philip," Contessa interjected. "I encourage you to preface that with 'uncle,' it makes him very happy. On the inside, where it's impossible to see."

Riley grinned wickedly. "Sure thing, Auntie Tes--"

"No," Contessa said. "He'll just make that fussy face he gets whenever he's uncomfortable about something--see, there it is. I might actually kill you."

"Would you sit down?" Number Man asked, before Riley could say it just might be worth it.

Riley, smirking but smirking _silently_ , sat down, and Contessa went to collect their sandwiches. She deposited the tray on their table and helped herself to a third of Number Man's sandwich and his pickle.

"I wanted the pickle," he said as soon as he registered the theft, far too belatedly for him to do anything about it.

"What pickle?" she asked.

"It doesn't have any calories," he said, looking forlorn. "You didn't need it."

"Right," Contessa said sarcastically, "because I'm a cyborg and therefore I'm only allowed to eat for energy."

"You should have asked them for two, then," he said. "Can you count that high?"

She shrugged. "I would have eaten them both, and then I'd have had to listen to _twice_ the whining. See, I can multiply, too!"

"Did you two bring me here to watch you bicker?" Riley asked. "And _are_ you a cyborg?"

"Sort of," she said. "We're here because we witnessed nonhuman material have a trigger event. We want to know how and why."

"Bullshit," Riley said.

"Not bullshit," Contessa said. "I was baking, and we saw a trigger vision. Then my bread jumped out of its container and ran off."

Number Man jumped in. "I thought it was a Brute or Breaker power. It regenerates when it's damaged, adds more mass, immune to everything we threw at it."

"So, Crawler? Except . . . a loaf of bread. Huh." Riley thought about it, then snapped her fingers. "Oh, I know."

"Yes?" Number Man asked.

"It's pretty simple. I was working in a lab earlier today, and I must have gotten something mixed up. Undoubtedly created and inhaled something that induces hallucinations by accident."

Contessa frowned.

Riley gave a theatrical sigh. "I always used to be so careful about these things, too. I've definitely lost my touch."

"This is serious," Contessa said. "We need to know if people are going to start having everyday items trigger. You're the closest thing we have to an expert on this."

"Well," Riley said. "You've noticed the nasty trigger events happening?"

"I'm familiar with it. When his partner died, similar things happened to people in the surrounding area. Not to mention all the deaths and mutations that occurred when we distributed parts of its corpse. That said, we never got anything _not_ human to trigger."

"Well . . . I think you told the Wardens that Scion wasn't the planner, didn't have a lot of imagination? Maybe he didn't give all his passengers the same restrictions as the other one did. Never thought he'd have to use them."

"Contessa," Number Man said suddenly, interrupting Riley speculations. "Ah, er—Look."

She followed the finger he was pointing to a television that was mounted on the wall.

It was displaying a live feed of the Three Blasphemies.

Who were fighting in concert against a building-sized mound of what appeared to be half-baked dough.

_I want to know what that is_ , Contessa thought, certain she already knew the answer.

Fog.

"It's what you think it is," she said.

"Perhaps we should assign it a Mover rating, because it got to Madrid from Spokane in less than twenty-four hours," he said.

They watched the fight for a few minutes. It seemed to be trying to absorb the Blasphemies, but they dodged and cut their way out of the monster with ease. The problem was that every cut and blow only increased its size.

The Number Man spoke. "This is an unmitigated disaster."

"Don't say that," she said.

"I understand why you might want to downplay it, Contessa, but I can do the math. That thing is going to cover something the size of Luxembourg within a day."

"Don't say that," she repeated, "because remarking on how bad something is will only make it get incredibly worse. That's how this world works, haven't you noticed?"

"Absurd," he replied.

It was at that point the Simurgh arrived on scene, crashing down from the heavens into the middle of the battlefield.

"I stand corrected," the Number Man said.

"Told you so," muttered Contessa.

They watched in fascinated horror as both the Blasphemies and the monster were _pulled apart_ into smaller and smaller pieces. Bodies became limbs became chunks became nothing within seconds, and the dough monster followed them into obliteration.

The Simurgh finished her descent, touching the ground. She furled her wings and, for the first time in history, bent over to pick something up. She turned it over and over in her hands.

The cameraman zoomed in, bringing the object the Simurgh was examining into clear view.

A battered fedora.

"Get the clones," Contessa said. "We're leaving. _Now_."

*

Teacher was waiting by the teleportation pad when Contessa and her acquisitions, bread machine of dubious value included, returned to his lair. "I thought something had happened," he said. "I'm glad you came back."

"Something did happen," Contessa said. "I found allies. The Number Man, Harbingers, and Siberian." She smiled at Teacher's lieutenants. "Satyr, Ingenue, don't you want to show them around, get them situated?"

"Actually, we—"

Contessa jabbed a finger into Satyrical's bare chest. "Out."

They beat a hasty retreat, Number Man and clones following closely behind them. Once they were gone, she turned on Teacher, who by now was looking a little apprehensive.

"Sleeper," she said.

The apprehension vanished. "An unstoppable Shaker and Master that everyone is afraid of? Immense potential for wide-area control. Exempli gratia, position him in Herzegovina, and suddenly nobody wants to have anything to do with the Balkans—an occurrence unprecedented in five millennia of human conflict. I assumed you understood this and that is why Cauldron didn't eliminate him."

"Firstly, I know you assumed nothing of the sort because you tried to hide it from me. Secondly, the S-class threats you've heard of exist because I _can't_ kill or control them, not because I think they're great fun to have around."

"I thought you _backed_ the Slaughterhouse Nine," he said.

"Do you see the Nine existing around here at all?" she asked. "I don't. They served their purpose, now they're gone. Coincidence? No. Focus, Teacher. What the _fuck_ is going through your head?"

"A single man in control of a universe. Ally with him, gain complete access to the riches of an entire dimension. No competition or interference."

"Idiocy," she said. "Part of me is wondering if you were just looking to befriend another pompous megalomaniac."

"You're scared of him," he said, after a brief period of studying her face. "You're worried I'm playing with fire."

"There's playing with fire and there's stripping yourself naked, covering yourself in pitch and gasoline, and mooning Behemoth during a nuclear firestorm. I'm not _afraid_ of Sleeper, I'm _fucking terrified_ of him."

He was at a loss for words. She decided to stare at him without blinking until he found something to say.

"I see," he said at last. "What do you want me to do?"

"It's not a question of what I want. It's a question of what you'll do," she said. "You'll stop."

"Are you threatening me?"

"No. I'm a precognitive, remember? In all the futures I see, you stop."

"Don't you mean _both_ futures? The one where I stop because you kill me, and the one where I stop because I don't want you to kill me?"

She crossed her arms. "There is such a thing as a stupid question."

"He'll be offended when he doesn't hear from me," Teacher said.

"He'll cope," she said, and left him with his thoughts.

A few hours later, Contessa was staring at the ceiling in her bedroom, thinking about the Simurgh. The Number Man was snuggled up against her side, head resting on her chest. He was dead asleep, snoring lightly and drooling heavily, and his body-weight had made her arm go numb. It would have been uncomfortable if she'd wanted it to be.

The Endbringer had returned to orbit at roughly the same time Contessa had been upbraiding Teacher.

No telling what that meant, though, not yet.

_Maybe_ everything would be okay.

And _maybe_ Scion would come back from the dead and apologize sincerely for all the trouble he'd caused and become earth's intergalactic protector.

This _shouldn't_ be so complicated.

Worse, she also didn't like what her persistent failures with the bread implied. If she couldn't get something so simple, so _basic_ , right without her power, what would happen when she moved on to bigger things? _Could_ she move on to anything else, or would she be forced to do as she was told, forever?

. . . Fuck it.

She removed herself from Number Man's grasp, got dressed, and stole through the complex. She stopped at the armory and then moved to a kitchen, where she measured out all the ingredients for bread, mixed them together in _precisely_ the correct order, and very deliberately activated the machine.

Then, walking backwards so she could still keep an eye on it, went to the table in the middle of the kitchen, climbed up on it, and manned the loaded M2 .50 caliber machine gun she'd picked up on her detour to the armory.

Every fiber of her being was focused on the machine, poised to spring into action, set to neutralize the wayward appliance if anything even _seemed_ to go wrong again.

At some point, Satyr entered, in search of a post-midnight snack.

He stared at her.

She stared at him.

He backed out of the room.

She returned her attention to her target.

Three and a half uneventful hours later, the machine emitted a cheerful _ding_.

Contessa slowly, carefully extricated the result.

It _looked_ like bread, she was pleased to see. She stabbed it with a fork. It _behaved_ like bread, in that it didn't react to her attack.

She let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.

Now for the ultimate test.

_I want to know if other people will think it tastes good._

They would.

She allowed herself a small smile, and resolved to share her accomplishment with her partners, such as they were. She collected the loaf of bread and set off for the dining room, where she knew breakfast was being served.

Satyrical's eyes lit up as she came in. "You cooked? As in, the most powerful Thinker in existence _cooked_? Gimme."

She obliged, and in moments the bread was distributed around the table.

"It's delicious," Ingenue gushed. "Did you put a hint of almond butter in it?"

Contessa glanced at her. "No?"

"It's something," Satyr said around a mouthful. "There's definitely almond."

"I didn't—"

"Let the baker have her secrets," Teacher said. Then, hypocritically: "Amaretto, perchance? I taste it, too."

Contessa set her own piece back down on her plate.

_I want to know why they think it tastes like almonds._

The answer hit her. She jumped up. "Spit it out!" she shouted.

It was too late. All three of them were already foaming at the mouth.

_I want to save their lives._

No answer. She looked around her, helpless, as Teacher, Ingenue, and Satyrical died one by one.

Poisoned.

In a way, it was more devastating than when she'd found the wreckage of Cauldron and thought she had failed, that Scion would win and nobody would mourn her death.

She was still pretty convinced the last part was true, if only because the lives of everyone she worked with ended in grisly death.

Well, mostly everyone. The Number Man, wearing only boxers, burst through the door. "Contessa! There's something—" He broke off when he saw the bodies. "I thought we were working with them."

"Pip," she said, her voice sounding strangled, "Did you know one of your clones stuffed the sugar canister with cyanide?"

His face went blank for a moment. Then he waved his arms, dismissing the question as irrelevant. "Never mind!  I think someone is trying to break in. Either that, or the dimension is about to collapse in on us."

Had Teacher been the only thing keeping the dimension intact?

She checked with her power. "It's an attack," she said, "but not one we need to be concerned about now that Teacher's gone. The Undersiders, I think. Annoying that they can puncture through to any dimension, of course—"

Alarm crossed his face. "Tattletale's coming _here_ and _now_ while I'm like _this_ and you don't think there's anything to be worried about?!"

Three gigantic monsters (actually two augmented dogs and a wolf, her power said) and a giant fabric tortoise, each with a single armed person on them, burst through a sudden dimensional tear.

The two groups, Number Man and Contessa and the blue-faced corpses on one side and the Undersiders on the other, stared at each other for a few moments. Tattletale's eyes moved from Contessa to the Number Man and back. An unholy glee suffused her face and she opened her mouth, but someone else spoke first.

"Criminy and Christ! That's impressive and all, but you need to put some damn pants on before you traumatize Foil and Parian."

_Huh?_

"Stranger," she said aloud.

_Path: deal with it_.

Two steps, pivot and throw a right hook into this patch of air—

A parahuman in a devil's mask and scarf materialized at the end of Contessa's fist.

"Fuck, ow! Why'd you do that? It was a compliment!"

Contessa looked back at Tattletale—why hadn't she been focused on her to begin with?—and stared at the younger Thinker, challenging her to have an opinion on the accidental massacre.

Foil started the conversation. "Did you murder everyone here?" she asked.

"No," Tattletale supplied the answer. "I think it's something more like manslaughter. How embarrassing. _Shameful_ , really. You know what would help reduce accidental poisonings? Serving packaged foods such as, for instance, delicious Oreos."

"It—I was just trying to see if I could do something without my power," Contessa said.

Before she could elaborate, she noticed someone she didn't recognize was standing next to her. An older teenager in a scarf, holding a horned mask in one hand and massaging a bruising cheek with the other. "Welp," the newcomer said. "Looks like the answer's in, and it's _nope_!" She cackled.

"Imp," Parian said reprovingly. "There's no need to be mean. She's obviously upset."

The Stranger—Imp—stopped laughing long enough to say, "Yes, but it's still fucking hilarious."

Contessa felt her cheeks flush. "Eighteen steps to kill you all," she muttered. Thirty-four, now that she'd told them.

Bitch shifted her position on her mutated wolf, and Contessa read aggression in the body language, but Tattletale held up a hand. "She's only sulking, Bitch. A bit immature," she added, "but I suppose you're powerful enough you can get away with it. Imp, a little consideration, please?"

Imp gave an exaggerated sigh. "I'm sorry, your scary suitedness, for rubbing your face in your incompetence. Who's your tailor?"

"I am."

"Huh. It's classy. Kind of has an old school Mafioso vibe. What are you countess _of_ , by the way?"

"Everything," Contessa said, then wondered briefly why she'd said that. "Why are you here?"

"We came to kick Teacher in the balls and drop him down an elevator shaft," Tattletale said, "but I feel the effort would be superfluous at this point. Maybe now we're here to recruit you."

She glanced at Number Man, who shook his head minutely. "I don't think we want to be recruited just now," she said slowly.

"I wouldn't say no to an alliance," Tattletale offered.

"We'll think about it. Please go now." She asked her power if there was anything else. "And take Imp with you, or we're going to keep her."

"Ha," Foil said. "I wish you would."

Would what? Contessa wondered as Tattletale and company shifted dimensions again.

She turned to Number Man, whose face was a deep pink for some reason. "We need to dispose of the bodies before the Students find out what happened," she said. "I can continue giving them orders for now. It won't be a permanent solution to the problem, but it will buy us breathing room."

"Problem? You told Tattletale the truth? You didn't intentionally poison them?"

"No . . ." Contessa said, hearing the evasion in her own voice. "Er, I was thinking about the Simurgh. And I wanted to prove something. Which is why I did not check whether the substance in the sugar tin was actually sugar."

He raised both eyebrows, which was the equivalent of a more usual man's explosive shouting fit. "Well, you certainly did prove something," he said. There was a very slight edge to his tone.

"I know," she said quietly. "I'm going to take the machine to Earth Bet and have the heroes analyze it."

"I doubt the appliance itself has Tinker or Breaker abilities," he said acidly. "I think it's more that you conjure a—a disaster vortex that swirls around your baking attempts."

"That's ridiculous," she said, but the protest sounded weak even to her own ears.

"I'm not," he said.

"You're right, it has to stop. I'll give it to the Wardens. They ought to know about the Blasphemies and the unusual trigger in any event."

He frowned. "I'll accept that," he said. "Provided you do nothing with it until the transfer happens."

Contessa nodded. She decided on giving it to Legend, simply to see how upset she could make him in less than five minutes.

"You turned Tattletale down," Number Man observed.

"I did."

"Does that mean the base is ours now? We're on our own?"

She heard the underlying question: you aren't taking on a new guiding force?

"You're a statistician," she said. "Surely you've noticed that employing me as a lieutenant is currently an action with a one hundred percent chance of fatality. I'm not sure I could get anyone to accept."

He looked at her pointedly, and she amended her statement: "I'm not sure I _should_ get anyone to accept."

Number Man swept an arm, encompassing all of Teacher's operations with the gesture. "Then we will handle this?"

"I think so, at least for now."

"I've never been in charge," he said reflectively.

"Neither have I," Contessa said. She thought about how the Doctor had changed over the years. "I think it must be very hard."

"But there are perks. We do have the power to change some things simply because we want to."

Contessa eyed him warily. She'd never pictured him as one to run mad with power, or anything else. Even _Harbinger_ had been understated, really, once you accounted for the excesses caused by King and Jack's influence. "Is there something you have in mind?"

The Number Man's eyes gleamed. "I have a confession to make, Contessa."

"Yes, Pip?" She didn't want to have to kill him.

"I hate white," he breathed. "I loathe it. I _despise_ it."

Contessa blinked. "Oh," she said. Behind her back, her grip on her knife relaxed. "I'll get you some paint."

He smiled, once again his mild, proper self. "I have some ideas about costumes for the students, too."

"I agree with them all," she said quickly. "In the meantime, can you help me with these bodies?"


	7. Contessa Receives a Visitor

** Chapter Seven: Contessa Receives a Visitor  **

Contessa frowned at the mirror. Something about her reflection was off, suspenders aside.

_How many times have I done this?_

17,114.

And she still couldn't get it right without help. She sighed, undid the mangled knot, and asked for a path to tying her tie for the 17,115th time.

Behind her, Number Man stepped out of the shower and began to towel off.

"I've been thinking," he said. "Let's collect Two-Six-Five when we get to Bet. We only have the clairvoyants Teacher left behind, and they aren't as useful."

Contessa considered the suggestion. "He seemed to be doing all right there on his own."

Number Man frowned as he buttoned his shirt. She knew he was trying to think up counter-arguments. He was thinking usefulness, and she'd said something about the boy's mental health. She waited.

"You didn't leave him with the Guild only because you thought it might be good for him," he said.

"True. I didn't want Teacher having access to that power."

"Exactly. I don't want _anyone_ else having access to that power," he said. "This base is full of people who have been stunted by Teacher's power. We have to come up with a plan for them in the long term. Having someone similar who openly and genuinely trusts you might help with managing them."

She handed him his glasses. "It might," she agreed.

"I think we can handle his power better than the Wardens might be able to."

Contessa wasn't convinced of that; with so many earths to cover, the Wardens might very well need someone who could see all of them, and she had no interest in policing _any_ of them. On the other hand, he'd explicitly told her he was bored, and Legend had been hostile to the idea of his working again—though that might only have been because he'd heard the suggestion from her lips. "I know we can certainly communicate better with him than they have been. You feel strongly about it?"

He finished doing up his trousers, then nodded.

"Okay. I'll set the coordinates for outside his building." She shrugged into her suit jacket and waited for him to finish lacing his shoes.

"I will carry your godforsaken bread machine. It's probably best if you don't touch it again."

"I can't hear you," Contessa said. "My tinnitus is acting up."

She knew he saw right through her lie, but he didn't say anything, and she was grateful for his forbearance.

*

The clairvoyant had already opened the door by the time they ascended the stairs to his apartment.

"Hey there. Still bored?"

Nod.

"Want to come back with us?"

His face split into an ear to ear grin and he dashed back in.

"I did say," Number Man said, as he followed her into the apartment. He went into the kitchen and emerged empty-handed. "That _thing_ is on the counter. It can stay there until they collect it."

Contessa was spared answering by Raj returning to his living room with a suitcase. Her power informed her that he had included two pairs of underwear, a toothbrush, a candy bar, and thirty video games.

"Raj," she said reprovingly, "I don't think that's everything you need."

He thought for a moment, nodded, and disappeared again. When he re-emerged, he was clutching his schoolbag, which was covered with Eidolon designs. He crossed the room to where his console was, unplugged it, and started wedging it into his backpack.

"We have a better setup where we're going," Contessa said. "We can leave this here. Go get your clothes."

He shook his head vehemently.

_Why?_ "Oh. Your high scores. Yes, okay. But Number Man will carry it. You should get the rest of your clothes."

_Dirty_ , he tapped on the PlayStation. _PC._

"Get them anyway. I'll bring your computer."

He relinquished control of the console to Number Man, careful not to touch him, and disappeared again. The slam of his bedroom door actually did aggravate her tinnitus. She slapped a hand to her ear in an attempt to disrupt the whine.

Number Man raised his eyebrows.

"Tinnitus is back," she explained. One of the reasons she didn't prefer to use firearms. She really ought to have used earplugs more often.

He nodded and indicated one of his own ears. "It's one of those days. I never expected to live long enough for it to matter."

She grimaced in acknowledgment of his statement. They'd all expected Scion to kill them; they'd all been wrong, except Eidolon. "I'll call the heroes. You take him, and I'll explain the situation."

"You'll be fine?"

"Legend will want to have a conscience at me again, but yes." She turned to look at Clairvoyant as he reemerged with a lumpy backpack. A mud-splattered sock stuck out from between the zippers. "Anything else you need?"

He gave her a thumbs up. She fiddled with one of the Tinkertech boxes that served as a half-assed replacement for Doormaker and gave it to Number Man. After a moment, the two disappeared, leaving her alone in the clairvoyant's suite with the abominable bread machine.

She found Raj's cell phone and started drafting a text message.

_Path: explain the problems with the bread machine in the way that will most annoy Legend without provoking any of the Wardens into attacking or trying to arrest me_.

The answer involved Legend huffing and clenching his fists a lot. Contessa smiled a little, pressed send, and set off to look for the laptop.

The clairvoyant's computer was sitting in his unmade bed. It was still open to a game that involved making roller coasters. She glanced at the screen and saw he'd managed to make all of his customers desperately unhappy and unable to escape. Was it a reflection of his background that he liked to run cruel experiments on helpless (albeit simulated) victims, or was it just normal boy antics?

Whatever. She shut the computer down and started to wrap the power supply around it.

Her hands froze. Fog was flooding across her future sight, interfering with her ability to chart a path that lasted longer than a minute. Something was about to be very, _very_ wrong.

_Path: getting out safely._

Contessa strode out of the bedroom and rushed for the door. Jumping out the window would be faster, but at this point she couldn't be sure she'd have a safe way to land. She was halfway there before a shadow fell across the living room. She stopped dead, the fog now absolute, and turned very, very slowly.

Satyrical, before his tragic and untimely death at her hands, had characterized her as the most powerful Thinker in existence.

He had actually been right.

Almost.

He had forgotten the fucking Simurgh.

Contessa stared at the elongated, bone-white face and considered the full implications of _second best_. Chief among these implications: _that isn't tinnitus._

And Number Man had heard it, too.

Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.

Contessa oh-so-casually reached into her pocket for the teleporter and switched it on. She pushed the button that would see her safely back to base.

Nothing happened. She fished it out of her pocket and examined it. The LED display flashed red.

_Path: fix it_.

It slipped out of her hands and splintered into a thousand pieces.

Oh.

She considered her options. Fighting was impossible. Running was a possibility, but she doubted she would get very far. Ziz did understand human speech, at least on some level, so talking might be an option. She couldn't ask for a direct path, and no hypothetical situation she could devise came even close to useful, so . . . She was on her own.

"Hello," Contessa offered. "Would you like to come in?"

The window that comprised one of the walls shattered outwards. The Simurgh folded her wings, ducked her head, and floated into the apartment. Despite her efforts and the high ceilings, she was too tall for the living room, and the ceiling cracked.

So did the floor. And the walls.

Contessa retreated as the Simurgh advanced.

Until the clairvoyant's couch slid across the floor and slammed into the back of her legs. She fell backward onto it.

Okay . . . okay. She could sit. Okay. And breathe. Yes. She called for a path to sitting quietly and breathing deeply.

The bread machine zoomed out from the kitchen. As it approached the Simurgh, its components separated themselves from each other and settled into floating in a halo around her head.

Ziz touched each piece in turn, going over every part of them with her hands. She put the machine back together manually, then disassembled it again. And again. And again.

It was all an act, Contessa knew. She remembered the analysis the Protectorate had gotten from Tattletale during the fight at New Delhi: the Endbringers were terror weapons and their form had nothing to do with their powers or perception. They were alien demons incapable of feeling anything like human emotion.

But she would be damned if she didn't actually think, however irrationally, that the Simurgh was _really fucking confused_.

The Simurgh took the bread machine apart for a fifth time and cocked her head to one side. After a few moments, Clairvoyant's laptop opened and hovered in front of Contessa. A text editor opened and keys began to move, apparently of their own accord.

EXPLAIN THIS DEVICE

Contessa couldn't find her voice.

The words **EXPLAIN THIS DEVICE** bolded themselves.

"It's for preparing food," she whispered. "That's all."

Contessa's awareness was flooded with images of people she'd seen over the years, beginning with the clairvoyant and Number Man and working back through her memory—nobody in particular, she realized. Just one theme, over and over again. Humans.

She blinked and the screen had a new word on it.

SUBJECT

Then she was reminded of slice of bread, bun, baguette, and roll she'd seen in her life, as well as every bag of flour and every field of grain.

NOT SUBJECT

The scene where the bread-monster had emerged from the machine replayed several times in her head.

**_ EXPLAIN _ **

"Something went wrong, but I don't know what it was. It was an accident and I don't have the ability to answer questions about it."

She saw Legend arrive behind the Simurgh, hovering in the air outside of the building. He made eye contact with her.

"Fuck," he said. " _Fuck_."

He looked at the Simurgh and then back at her.

"Fuck!" he shouted.

He raised his hands and fired off a couple of lasers. Two of the Simurgh's wings moved to intercept them. A handful of crystalline "feathers" scattered across the room.

The Simurgh rotated midair, turning to face the flying blaster. She screamed.

Attacking the Simurgh in the middle of New York after nearly eight months of peace? Did Legend's stupidity have _any_ limits?

Apparently not. He fired ten lasers at once and they were again absorbed by the Simurgh's wings. "Legend!" she shouted, but she knew he couldn't hear her over the screaming. "Please refrain being a complete ass just this once!"

He didn't reply and fired again. This time Contessa noticed the Endbringer seemed to be moving her wings _into_ the line of fire—

He was shooting at _her_ , not Ziz.

And the Endbringer was blocking his shots, protecting her.

She curled up into one corner of the couch and hugged her knees.

So this was what madness felt like.

It was _so much worse_ than she'd ever imagined.

Legend's body jerked out of the air and he slammed into the ceiling first, then into the couch beside her. His hands were beneath his ass, palms down on the sofa.

"Great," he said through gritted teeth. "More fucking body control."

"Thought you'd be used to being a puppet by now," Contessa remarked. "I have to say that the Simurgh making you sit on your hands is quite a few steps down from being Cauldron's public face."

"Don't talk to me," he growled. "The hell is that around her head?"

"Sorry, can't say. I'm not allowed to talk to you," Contessa said snippily.

If Legend replied, she didn't hear it as she became lost in her own mind as the Simurgh dredged through her psyche. It was less painful than Sleeper rifling through her head, but somehow more intrusive. She snapped back to the present and found that Valkyrie had arrived, armed with Eidolon, a Shaker that created shields from forcefields, a Striker that could freeze objects in time, and a Mover that gave her flight.

The Simurgh began to retreat inch by inch in the face of an onslaught from Eidolon, and the Striker advanced on Contessa.

_Path: avoid all attacks from the Wardens and escape_ _back to Number Man_ _alive and uninjured, without being followed._

One hundred nine steps.

She started. Stand up,  twist her body _this_ way to avoid the Striker's fingers, move over to the door _just so_ to avoid attention, and—

Her body wasn't responding. She was levitating, moving toward the blown-out wall.

Ziz was leaving, yes, but she was taking Contessa with her.

She wasn't sure if it was the Simurgh's influence or because the shreds of her sanity had decided to surrender their last, tenuous hold on things, but her mind went utterly blank.

Contessa looked down and saw the pieces of her erstwhile bread machine trailing behind them, saw the clairvoyant's ruined apartment complex and then the city block and then the neighborhood and then New York getting smaller and smaller as they flew higher--high enough that the lack of oxygen finally, mercifully made her pass out.


	8. Contessa Goes to the Doctor

"It's just so _complicated_ ," the young woman exclaimed, clearly exasperated. She was wearing civilian clothes—drab, more shapeless than most women in their early twenties would be content with—and, despite her obvious beauty, she wore no makeup and had pulled her hair back into a severe bun.

"Can you unpack that for me?" Jessica Yamada asked.

Her patient snorted. "My sister mastered me and turned me into a monster that would make Bonesaw jealous. My parents, my _mother_ , abandoned me, left for two years with nothing but my thoughts, thoughts that Amy put into me. They were wealthy enough to treat me at home, but they didn't _want_ to."

Jessica made two notes: powerlessness, abandonment. "Anger is a natural response," she said.

"It's past anger. It's hatred. Of myself, too. I was so oblivious. All the signs of something being wrong were there—hell, if I'd just thought a little about what Tattletale had said, I could have, should have put two and two together. And then to realize my power played a part in all this, she was lying about being immune the entire time, and every second she spent around me was making her more and more twisted . . ." She trailed off, and Jessica wrote _guilt_ on her pad waited for her to continue.

"Then there's Scion. Billions dead, worlds demolished, humanity sent back to the stone age—and I'm fixated on myself. Do I even have a _right_ to feel so strongly about something objectively so small? I'm still alive. And fixed, more or less." She smiled wanly. "At least it's nice to be able to talk to you directly."

The ceiling fell in before Jessica could reply.

Victoria flew across the room in an instant, pushing her out of the way of collapsing rubble and putting herself in between Jessica and the—

The Simurgh.

The Simurgh had just destroyed her office and interrupted her session.

Jessica knew she should be screaming or running or screaming and running, but she was mostly _annoyed_.

"Can I help you?" she asked the Simurgh in a tone that very clearly conveyed that _yes_ was not an acceptable answer.

The Simurgh stared down at Jessica, who became aware of a high-pitched cry at the edge of her consciousness, like an irritated cat or someone badly singing Chinese opera.

So that was the "scream." Interesting.

"I'd like you to leave," Jessica said firmly. "Come back when I'm not with a patient."

The air just below the remaining parts of the ceiling tore open.

A barrage of dozens, _hundreds_ of objects rained through from the other dimension. Several of them struck Jessica on their way to the floor, but they didn't hurt. Jessica caught one as it bounced off her head.

. . . Bread?

Jessica started to question the reliability of her perceptions as the parts of her ruined office that were not filled with naked Endbringer and wings were covered by a knee-deep pile of football-sized loaves of bread. A dark-haired woman wearing a white dress shirt and black slacks followed, landed in front of Jessica. She was clutching a suit jacket and staring, wide-eyed, at nothing in particular.

One side of the building collapsed as the bread-spewing portal sealed and the Simurgh departed.

_Dream_ , Jessica decided. _Has to be_.

"What," Victoria said, "the fuck. I...think I'd better go get the Wardens."

Jessica began kicking her way through the bread to the woman the Simurgh had dropped off, but Legend arrived before she was able to reach her unexpected guest. As he surveyed the room, his expression shifted from grim determination to utter confusion.

"Contessa," Legend said. The woman flinched like he'd slapped her. "What the _fuck_ is this?"

Jessica removed the remaining loaves from her path and stooped down to examine the woman. Contessa rolled away, evading Jessica's outstretched fingertips by millimeters, and wedged herself into the space between one of Jessica's couches and the only intact corner remaining in the room.

Valkyrie flew in through the roof, carrying Chevalier. She deposited him onto one pile of bread, which was flattened beneath the weight of his armor.

Chevalier moved to scratch his head, but his helmet got in the way. "This isn't what I thought I was getting into. This is . . . I don't know what the fuck this is."

"I know," Legend said. He shook his head. "We've found somebody so messed up even the Simurgh thinks she needs a shrink. Wrap your head around _that_."

Chevalier frowned. He started to approach the corner, but Contessa spoke for the first time.

"Stay back."

His frown deepened, but he didn't approach her further. Was it out of respect or fear? "Can you tell us what happened?"

The response, when it finally came, was almost too quiet to be heard. "No."

"Would you care to explain—well, any of this?"

"I would not." After another pause, she spoke again. "Leave me alone."

Someone knocked on the door. Jessica was relieved that there was still at least one person in the world who thought doors were the correct way to enter a room. "Just a minute," she called. "There's a bunch of—" She couldn't bring herself to say there was a pile of bread obstructing the inward swing of the door. "The door's blocked from this side."

After a moment, the door shattered.

A man with close-cropped blond hair and wearing a button-down shirt, tan slacks, and large-frame glasses stood on the other side. He was holding a retractable ball point pen in his hand.

"Did you break that door with a pen?" Chevalier said. He sounded a little envious.

The man in the glasses ignored Chevalier. He returned the pen to his shirt pocket—it had a pocket protector, which Jessica had never actually seen before—and looked around the room.

"Oh," he said as he took in the sheer breadth and depth of the loaves. "Oh, my."

"You're allowed to cuss, Number Man," Legend said. "That's what we've been doing."

Number Man ignored Legend's commentary and began to pick his way through the bread to where Contessa was hiding.

"Keep away from her," Legend said, raising his hand to fire. Number Man's shoe sent a loaf flying into the air and careening into Legend's wrist. The laser went wide, shattering the glass frame that held Jessica's diploma from graduate school.

"Hey!" she shouted. "What the fuck, Legend!"

Legend had the grace to look a little embarrassed. "Sorry," he muttered. "I'll have it replaced. Along with the rest of the building."

Jessica was tempted to ask _how_ he was going to have it replaced, considering that the Bay Area no longer existed. Maybe he could go to another earth that had been slightly less scoured and explain the situation.

Number Man was talking to Chevalier. "We could go about this conversation in one of two ways," he said. "One, we talk civilly about a mutual problem. Two, you threaten me and I reveal my countermeasures in order of increasing severity to the point where you will have to choose between letting us go and precipitating the wholesale economic and social collapse of greater New York."

"That would violate the truce," Chevalier said.

" _Fuck_ your truce," Number Man said levelly. "If you want it kept, the burden is on you to behave."

Valkyrie spoke. "Some might say you're acting with unwarranted arrogance."

"I think you and I are in agreement, here," he said. "I've had to take precautions because Chevalier is still resentful about Cauldron and Legend is wholly irrational on the point. It would be trivially easy for the two of them to talk themselves into executing her out of hand."

_Cauldron?_ Jessica thought. She so distracted by the thought that she nearly missed how he had divided the Wardens into "crazy, murderous Legend" and "reasonable, not murderous Valkyrie" with "waffling Chevalier" in the middle. Ciara could probably see through it, but she _was_ still prone to accepting flattery.

"That is traditionally one of the ways we have dealt with people exposed to the Simurgh for too long," Chevalier said.

The Number Man shrugged. "A dangerous path to go down, when you consider that every parahuman except her was exposed to the Simurgh for the entire Scion fight," he said. "It's probably best the Endbringer chose to eliminate that outlier with something as innocuous as this."

"There is nothing ever innocuous about either the Simurgh or Contessa!" Legend shouted. He was in the middle of deploying his lasers to destroy multiple loaves of bread at once.

"You know what happened?" Chevalier asked, ignoring Legend.

"Not exactly," the Number Man said. "But I think there are some powerful context clues."

"Are you saying," Chevalier began, but stopped. He shook his head, as though unable to acknowledge his thoughts by speaking them out loud. "Are you saying," he said, trying again, "that the Simurgh abducted a human being with the intention of repeatedly making her bake bread?"

"A little over thirteen hundred times, assuming all of it ended up here. I suspect it was an attempt to get her to replicate the time she caused a trigger event in a bread machine, which is what spawned the monster that fought the Three Blasphemies."

"I suppose that explains the text message I received from her _before_ the Simurgh kidnapped her," Legend remarked. "It said, and I quote, 'meet 265 digs kild 3 blasphesmies cookin lol.' What the fuck was I supposed to do with that?"

Chevalier apparently felt the same way about Number Man's pronouncement, as his attempts to wrap his head around it were visibly failing. "I—just—what—fuck—no, that can't be right. Only humans can trigger."

"There is some small precedent," Number Man said. "The Three Blasphemies were powered, and they weren't human. Dragon doesn't have DNA, but she still had a trigger event."

"Instances of Tinkertech _approximating_ humanity," Chevalier said. "But dough? How does that happen?"

"I believe she forgot the yeast," Number Man said.

Legend snorted. "Liar. We know how her power works, now. _She doesn't forget to do things_."

The Number Man shrugged. "That's true when she's using her power. She _hasn't_ been, lately. The results have been somewhat uneven."

"I can fucking hear you," Contessa said.

"Correction," said the Number Man. "The results have been completely disastrous."

"Less disastrous than letting her go would be," Legend said. "I imagine your idea of a solution here is to release her with complete amnesty."

"Amnesty for what? Unless you're saying her baking is _criminally_ bad." He paused for a moment during which something like a smile briefly touched his lips. "If you _were_ seriously contending that, I would volunteer to be a witness for the prosecution."

A small sound of protest came from the corner.

"What do you propose, then?" Chevalier asked. "And we both know it doesn't matter what you say, it matters if she agrees."

The Number Man nodded and finished his progress to where Contessa was hiding. He easily moved the three hundred fifty pound couch out of his way with one hand, and sat on the armrest.

"I was thinking this," he said to Contessa. "We leave immediately, and stop or undo everything I've set in motion. You stay off of Bet and away from any portals leading into Bet, permanently, and undergo a complete psychological evaluation without the aid of your power. They can determine whether you need follow-ups and how many."

"Okay," she said.

"How do we know that's not a lie?" Legend asked.

"She stopped using her power once he arrived," Valkyrie said.

"And she's ludicrously bad at lying on her own," Number Man added. "It's like asking a crumb-covered child what happened to the cookies and watching it stumble through a chaotic tale about peculiarly sweet-obsessed highwaymen."

Contessa's mouth tightened, but she didn't say anything.

Chevalier spoke after a little bit. "If we suspect anything amiss, I'll ask Valkyrie to go after both of you."

That sounded like acquiescence to Jessica.

"I wouldn't expect anything less," the Number Man said. He pulled out of one of his pants pockets and pressed a little red button. A tear opened mid-air, and through it Jessica saw a white room with two white couches. He stood and extended a hand to Contessa. "Let's go home."

It wasn't until they'd stepped through and he turned to her expectantly that Jessica realized that _she_ was the one he expected would be conducting the evaluations. Chevalier and Valkyrie seemed to agree with his assumption, and Legend was too busy vaporizing bread with his lasers to notice.

"Let me grab a few things," she said. "I'll be along in a minute."

The Number Man nodded and disappeared completely through the portal.

"I'll see if I can't get this cleared up before you come back," Legend said. "We'll start looking for another office for you as well."

"Thank you," Jessica said.

"You look nervous," Chevalier said.

"Something's telling me that this is a bad idea," she admitted.

"Maybe," Chevalier said. "It could very well be that the Simurgh had _you_ in mind when she made her move and, through you, the stability of the Wardens. We're trying to build something good, here, and she has historically targeted people who do that."

Jessica considered this, but didn't stop packing her briefcase. It was a possibility, but . . . Duty called.

A young man who looked like someone had recently burned out his eyes sealed the portal after Jessica had stepped through. The Number Man and Contessa were sitting on one of the couches. She had her head in her hands and appeared to be  . . . plugged in? to some device the Number Man held. He frowned at whatever the screen was telling him. "Nothing seems to be wrong," he said.

"Of course not, you sadistic shitwaffle. She'll have taken steps to ensure that any damage is hidden from the diagnostic scans, _obviously_. Everything is pain. I hate you."

He rolled his eyes. "Melodrama. Brains do not have pain receptors."

" _Yours_ doesn't. _Mine's_ on fire. It's going to melt. That's it, that's the Simurgh's plan, trick you into melting my brain."

"Would that it were that simple," he said. "We'll have to get Bonesaw to do a more thorough evaluation."

"We'll have to get Bonesaw to bring Gray Boy back again. How would you like to be scalped? I'm thinking I can get him to use a scalding knife."

"Hold still, I'm taking this out." He set the Tinkertech aside and wrapped an arm around her. "It was admittedly cruel of me to save your life and then check you for sabotage. Having me brutally tortured for hundreds of thousands of years is a reasonable and proportionate response."

She leaned into his shoulder. "You understand."

"Words cannot _express_ how much you owe me," he said.

"Can numbers?"

"Oh, yes," he said softly. "You'd need to use your power to understand the _scale_ , but it's possible."

"You make it sound like you did something more harrowing than talk to Tattletale."

"I _did_ ," he said. "I _went_ to Tattletale _because I needed her help_. I'll be washing residual smugness off of myself for years."

"What you mean is I'll be hearing about it for years," Contessa said.

"You can start working your debt off now. Sit down with—" He looked at Jessica.

"Mrs. Yamada," Jessica supplied.

"—Mrs. Yamada, and get the psych eval out of the way."

Contessa's eyes snapped open and fell on Jessica. "You're not serious."

"The last time I played a practical joke was in 1986," he said. "Thirty people died."

She was sitting upright now, and frowning at him. "I thought you were just saying that to make them back off."

"Partially, but I thought you were showing signs of instability before the Simurgh came along," he said. "This might help. Besides which, you agreed."

"I'd asked for escape and my power suppressed itself when you arrived. I figured it was calculating that we'd only get them to let us go if I wasn't using it and just went along with whatever you said. I didn't know you expected me to mean it."

"You want us to _lie to the Faerie Queen_? Did the Simurgh make you stupid?"

"I'd say rather that listening to that scream for seventy-eight hellacious hours has made me _considerably_ less willing to put up with bullshit."

Contessa's behavior didn't qualify for a professionally recognized diagnosis, but Jessica was able to categorize it all the same: parahuman temper tantrum. Though, considering she was one of maybe three psychologists left in the United States, she probably _could_ get "throwing a superpowered fit" into the DSM . . . a project for later, perhaps. "What _is_ your power?" she asked.

Contessa stared at her for a full ten seconds. "Your husband is a little too selfish to really accept your dedication to your work, and he's always been jealous of your proximity to so many parahumans. Now it's worse because you're still important, but the world isn't going to need any third-rate professors of music theory for quite some time. This won't stop you both from trying, which in this case means having the same three fights until your death from lung cancer in 4,416 days."

"You can see the future," Jessica said.

"If I feel like wasting time. More importantly, I can shape it, choose what I want and make it so, one step at a time. Your life, for instance, would be very different if you quit smoking, divorced your husband, and approached Chevalier."

The eyeless boy spared Jessica from having to formulate a reply. He took a pen out of his pocket and started to hit it against his thigh.

"I _do_ understand," Contessa said. "I know she's nice. But you're wrong. I—"

A furious barrage of taps cut her off.

"Yes, I _am_ very scared right now. I need to think about it, not talk about it with strangers. You know my power. It will make me be all right."

He responded.

"How did you know that?" She shook her head. "Never mind. It's nice of you to think about this, but we're going to return her to Bet right now."

A sly smile crept across his face.

She frowned at him a moment. "You _swallowed the teleporter_? That was our last one!" She rose to her feet and reached into her pocket, retrieving a little knife. "If you think I won't cut it out of your sneaky little guts—"

"Contessa," the Number Man said. "Panacea would need to touch him."

"Riley wouldn't," she said grimly.

"Perhaps not." He took off his glasses and started polishing them on his shirt. "I think you should consider _not_ stabbing your allies mere hours after you were exposed to the Simurgh's scream."

There was a pause.

" _Fine_ ," she said. "I'll do it."

"Mm, I don't know if I believe you," he said. "Which is why I went through a list of the Students' abilities and found a perception Thinker who can detect use of parahuman abilities in the surrounding area. We'll be sitting in the next room over, and she'll let me know if you start trying to use your power in here."

"You're worse than the Simurgh," she muttered. She glared at Jessica. "What do I need to do to make this be done?"

"That depends largely on how _you_ want to approach this," Jessica said. "If you're not sure, I brought some forms I usually ask new patients to fill out. That will give me an idea of where to start asking questions."

"I will do that," Contessa said. Then she added: "My English isn't very good without my power."

Considering the nearly childish shiftiness that accompanied the remark, Jessica mentally flagged it as a lie—the Number Man had been right—but said she would take it into account.

Apparently satisfied, Contessa started writing. It took her about ten minutes to fill out the intake paperwork, and Jessica reviewed it in less than half that time. Fully two thirds of the answers, including _Name_ and _Address_ been left blank. _Date of Birth_ simply had one word, "winter," next to it, _Place of Birth_ was followed by "the bedroom," and the section on educational history had an X through it. Parental medical history indicated she'd been orphaned at the age of nine by "monsters," she claimed to average less than six hours of sleep a _week_ , and reported difficulty expressing emotions, frequent thoughts about harming or killing others, large gaps in memory, detachment, dependency on others, and longstanding feelings of guilt and sadness.

Jessica glanced up. Contessa was hugging her knees. She was holding her knife—probably a comfort thing, because parahumanity—and would have looked considerably less defensive crouching behind a shark-filled moat.

"I think," Jessica said, "I will need a lot of context for this."


	9. Contessa Questions Herself

**January, 2014**

Contessa dreamt. The Simurgh featured prominently, as did a crushing sense of despair and the hellish sights and smells of freshly, perfectly baked bread, fluffy white and crispy golden and soul-meltingly horrific.

The dreams seemed to be vignettes, each one ending in a terrible bread-related death. In one, Contessa was walking down a street when she came upon a bakery. Her dream self decided to buy some bread. No sooner was she inside than the building collapsed on her. In another, she tried her hand at baking bread without the assistance of an infernal machine and the oven electrocuted her.

When she woke up, blinking away visions of the Simurgh impaling her with rebar, she stayed still so as not to disturb Number Man.

_Path: never dream about the Simurgh again_.

Fog, of course.

_Path: never dream about bread again_.

Fog.

_Path: no more dreams_.

Fog.

Which confirmed her suspicions: the Simurgh had definitely left something behind. Maybe the dreams were what they seemed to be on the surface: insurance that she'd never try to bake (or do anything, really) without her power again. But maybe the nightmares would happen every time she slept, and she'd start to postpone or avoid sleep and end up breaking her implants and having an aneurysm at the worst possible time. Maybe it would get worse and she'd lose her mind. Maybe . . .

She noticed that she was spooning a pillow, not Number Man, and grumbled at it for a little while before tossing it aside and reaching over to turn on the bedside lamp.

The beam illuminated not only a handful of drawings Number Man had pinned up around the room, but Number Man himself, who was standing near the doorway. He had a machine gun trained on her.

It took her a split second to analyze the situation. He was standing close enough to her that he wouldn't miss, and standing far enough away she wouldn't be able to reach him before he'd gotten off several rounds. Knowing him, he had probably wiped each round down before loading it to reduce the possibility of jamming. Also—she checked with her power and confirmed that, yes, he'd taken her knife.

If he decided to pull the trigger, she wouldn't survive.

_He_ wouldn't, either, now that she'd processed him as a threat, but he'd likely already realized that. Was that the Simurgh's plan, to have them kill each other?

"Sorry," he said. He sounded genuinely apologetic, but he didn't lower the weapon. "I thought I'd be able to choose before you woke up."

"Oh, then I'll just pretend to still be asleep." She pulled the blankets back up and flipped onto her side, exposing her back to him.

"Thank you. That does help."

She ignored him.

"I don't know what to do," he said after several minutes had passed. "Whatever choice I make will be wrong."

"Don't ask _me_ for advice," she retorted. "I'm asleep."

"Stop sulking. You'd be thinking the same thing in my place."

Her power judged it was safe to reply. "I _am_ thinking the same thing," she admitted. "Suicide is the obvious way out of a Simurgh trap, though of course maybe having me dead is her plan."

The door opened and the clairvoyant stepped inside. He frowned and directed them to _stop it_.

Number Man hastily turned and tried to hide the machine gun behind his back.

"We're fine, Raj. Stomach still hurts?" she asked.

Raj nodded.

"Good," she said. "Hope it teaches you a lesson about eating Tinkertech."

He flipped her off.

"Thanks for what you did, though," she said to Raj. "You always have my back."

_Are you ok?_

"Yes." She got out of bed. "We're both okay. There's some medicine in the men's bathroom two floors down that will help your stomachache. Take one of the pills from the blue bottle and then go to bed."

No sooner had he turned to go than she propelled herself into Number Man's back, sending both of them to the ground. She rolled away from him with the machine gun and unloaded it, threw the barrel magazine aside, and pulled the bolt out.

"Ow," he said. "What happened to you being suicidal?"

"Talking with that psychologist you foisted on me reminded me of the Irregulars. The bitch already tried to kill me once and failed, thanks in large part to you. I see no need to make it easier on her the second time around."

He fixed his glasses, which the tackle had knocked askew. "I doubt outright killing you was her plan this time around. She could have done it at any point while you were gone."

"It's true I think it's more likely I've been wired to make an immense amount of trouble at some point down the line. I will say, though, the impression I got from her before she released me that she found me _annoying_ at the end of it all, like I'd wasted her time."

"Maybe it didn't have anything to do with you," he said. "The conventional wisdom is that Thinkers, or at least precognitives, can interfere with her power. But Tattletale speculated that perception powers enhanced _hers_. Maybe she just wanted access to your power and used your unfortunate lack of baking skills as a pretext."

Contessa frowned. "I don't think she'd need to borrow my power. She's more powerful than I am, if you judge by results. I built a lot of things over the years, and she devoted a good deal of effort to undoing or destroying all of that."

"Then perhaps the conventional wisdom is true. Precognitives _do_ interfere with her, and you interfere with her more than most. Then she decided it was worth spending time to pick you apart."

It was a sobering thought.

And not one entirely based in reality.

"I need to tell you something," she said slowly. "There's a part of me that wasn't with the Simurgh."

"How?" he asked.

She sighed. He was going to find this extremely upsetting.

She told him anyway.

" _Sleeper?!_ " he yelped.

*

**March, 2014**

Contessa stepped through the portal onto clean white sand and looked around.

The scene reminded her of the generic beach photos that came preloaded as a desktop background or screensaver onto the computers Cauldron had used. The waves she saw were not unruly, the water was clear, and the temperature and wind were _just right_.

Except for the sound of the surf, it was silent. There was no evidence of human habitation in sight—no tourist traps or cramped buildings built next to each other in an effort to maximize the number of folk who could lay claim to owning "beachfront property" were present. There were no gulls picking at the trash for the simple reason there was no trash, either on the sand or in the sea.

In short, it was nothing like an actual beach.

Sleeper was there, sitting on a lawn chair and sunning himself.

As she got closer, she saw that he was clad in a rose-colored speedo and reading _Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes_.

"That's disgusting," she said.

"I'm not sure I can take the sartorial judgment of a woman who wears a tie and trilby seriously," he replied.

She removed her hat and held it at an angle that blocked her view of the speedo and all it failed to cover. "I was in a Simurgh attack," she said.

"You were wearing the suit long before the Simurgh existed," Sleeper said. "Don't blame her for—that."

"I was in a Simurgh attack _recently_."

"I hope she inspired you to get different clothes," he said acidly.

"Even worse," Contessa said shortly. "She made me bake her over a thousand loaves of bread."

He glared at her. "You normally make your lies more credible."

"Look through my mind if you don't believe me. Beginning about six days after I saw you last."

After a moment, his eyebrows rose and he shut his book. "My word. How interesting." He smiled thinly. "You don't come out looking at all well in this. I didn't know your tear ducts were operational."

"The Simurgh could make anyone cry, and I was with her _by myself_ for _seventy-eight hours_. Keep it all if you want. I'm sure you'll get more pleasure out of it than I will."

"You'd offer me something this delectable _gratis_? What are you up to?"

Contessa shrugged. "It's sort of an apology. I can't take part in the bakeoff anymore. Whatever part of me thought that I could reclaim my childhood self by making food has been replaced by a barren, landmined hellscape surrounded by electrified barbed wire. If I think about going down that path again, it _hurts_. Metaphorically. I think. The point is that the Simurgh turned food preparation into the psychic equivalent of touching a hot stove."

"You're reneging on our deal? You _forfeit_?"

"My power is a lot more extensive than I initially led you to believe. My initial plan was to fake turning it off and win that way." Technically that was a lie; her original plan had been to ignore the situation entirely and hope someone else would take care of him. "There wasn't a way you were ever going to win fairly," she went on. "This way, you at least get something out of it and I don't have to risk drawing her attention again."

Outrage flashed across his face. "Very well, I will relieve you of your burden. However, I think your honesty deserves some reward. Perhaps I should give Fortuna back to you. Maybe it will give you a better sense of what the Simurgh has prevented you from 'reclaiming,' as you put it."

"Uh, that's kind of you, but that's not necessary," Contessa said, letting her power shift her body away from him. "Really, it's not. Thank you for the offer, though."

"I _insist_ ," he said, and all the emotions and details he'd wiped from her earlier slammed into her psyche.

_Now_ , Contessa thought. A small portal opened inches above his head, and a white-gloved hand reached through and touched him.

Sleeper froze. In the same moment, Contessa stepped backwards through the door that opened behind her. Number Man was waiting there, standing on an uninhabited plain along with Valkyrie and an older, red-headed teenager wearing a white bodysuit.

"He'll be stopped in time for a little over three minutes," Contessa told Valkyrie. "That should be enough time."

Valkyrie nodded and had Doormaker's shade open another portal to Zayin. She stepped through and sealed it behind her.

"You recovered your memories?" Number Man asked.

"And got rid of the ones from my stay with Ziz," she said. She couldn't assume that would remove every effect, but she thought it would go a long way to settling her recent emotional turbulence.

Valkyrie came back less than two minutes later. "Sleeper is dead," she informed them. "I believe the resulting destruction rendered much of the Eurasian continent on Zayin uninhabitable. I trust this was worth it."

"We wouldn't have asked for your time otherwise," Number Man said.

When the Wardens had gone, he turned to Contessa. "What are you going to do now?"

"Copy my older self into something that the Simurgh hasn't touched," she said without hesitation. "Can you go to Marquis and ask him to have tea with us? Include his daughter, but make it seem like inviting her is a polite afterthought."

*

**June, 2014**

Jessica touched her palm to her forehead.

"What?" Contessa asked.

"Contessa—Contessa, cloning yourself and then taking care of the clone is _not_ what I meant when I said you need to practice self-care."

"Why not?"

"At this point, I'm not sure I could explain it in a way that would get through," Jessica said wearily. "We'll come back to that later, when we discuss homework for the upcoming week. So Legend told me you have a second clone—"

"There are five, actually," Contessa replied. "Four of them have the memories that the Simurgh couldn't touch. The fifth is more of a blank slate, programmed with a set of skills and a worldview grounded in deontological ethics, and I sent her to bug Le—ehhm, help the Wardens."

Jessica pinched the bridge of her nose. "Okay. Can we talk more about Legend?"

Contessa narrowed her eyes. "Why?"

"He came to see me about you."

"And?"

"He told me about the clone you sent to him. Says she won't leave and keeps asking him what she should do."

"That's what I did to the Doctor at the same age. She coped. So will he."

"Did you also blow up her house and trigger her son?"

"What? No." She thought for a little bit and realized that these things had in fact happened, contrary to her expectation. "And it was Legend who did those things, not her."

"In response to what he perceived as a threat to his family."

"If the idea was to kill them, they'd already be dead and it would look like someone else did it. He'd realize this if he thought about it for more than the split second it takes for him to get an emotion. He was _supposed_ to be irritated, not attempt to kill a child because she looked like me."

"You miscalculated."

Apparently, but how? She set the question aside for later. "Doesn't matter. He was still irritated, anyway, so mission accomplished."

"Why?" Jessica asked.

"Why what?"

"Why do you want to irritate Legend?"

Contessa folded her arms. "Because."

Jessica leaned back in her seat. "I'll give you time to put your thoughts into words."

She drew her knees up and turned into the couch, angling her body so she couldn't see Jessica's face. "Legend wasn't involved in Cauldron at all, other than to keep quiet about our existence and Alexandria's double life. That was _it_ , shut up and zap bad guys. But if you went by the way he carries on about it, you'd think _he_ was the one who had to enforce Cauldron's contracts or had to contain or clean up after the experiments or primed them for brainwashing or—" Contessa hazarded a glance at her therapist, who was writing quite a bit down onto her pad. "He's presumptuous," she said finally. "Trying to carry a burden that isn't his."

"You feel he's intruding on your territory?" Jessica asked.

"I don't want to talk about this anymore."

"We don't have to, but I want you to think about why you've resorted to gleeful sadism as a coping mechanism for—"

Contessa held up a finger, silencing Jessica, and looked over at the potted plant Number Man had put in the room as part of his continuing efforts to spruce the place up.

The plant seemed to sneeze.

"Fortuna," Contessa said.

A pale, serious-faced girl peeked out from behind the pot. "Are you going to die?" she asked Contessa, sounding more curious than anything else.

"In thirty years or so, yes," Contessa said. When Fortuna fixed Jessica with a suspicious stare, she added, "I'm not sick. Think of her as a priest, not a doctor."

Fortuna seemed to accept that. She came out from behind the plant and came over to where Contessa was sitting. "You look like Mother," she said.

"I suppose I do. It's past time for you to be in bed." Contessa rose from the couch and picked her clone up. After a moment's hesitation, Fortuna settled into the hug. "Sorry," Contessa said to Jessica. "I have to take care of this."

"I'll come with you, if you don't mind?"

Contessa frowned a little, but nodded. "Their dorm is this way."

Two of her clones were already asleep, having squeezed themselves into one bed. Siberian stood between them and the door, presumably watching for danger. The other was sitting in an overstuffed armchair with Doctor Manton's clone. He appeared to be reading from a large book of fairy tales.

She transferred the remaining clone into Siberian's arms. "Good night," she said.

Siberian nodded and Contessa shut the door.

"Well, okay," Jessica said. "I probably should have seen that one coming."

"I actually _didn't_ ," Contessa said. "The original Manton wasn't a very attentive father and I didn't take him into account when I initially planned for my siblings. He's much better at foster parenting than the Doctor was, anyway. He was upset when I peeled off the one to send to Legend, but I talked him down."

"What—" Jessica said. "I'm sorry, give me a moment to process this."

Contessa briefly accessed her power, and was surprised at what was behind her therapist's expression. "You think I'm a worse monster than Eidolon? As in dull-mopey-egotistical-completely-useless-against-Scion-even-though-that-was-the-only-reason-we-tolerated-him-to-begin-with-and-oh-by-the-way-subconsciously-created-the-Endbringers-to-make-himself-feel-better Eidolon?"

"Fleeting thought. Please stop reading my mind."

"Sorry," Contessa said again.

"Let's talk about your reaction, though. You didn't like Eidolon?"

"He's--my power didn't work on him, so I couldn't predict him. We'd be sitting there conducting business as usual, thinking about how to shore up the Protectorate or whom to target as clients and suddenly he would storm in and ask these stupid questions, like why we were kidnapping dying people or why hadn't we killed the Siberian yet."

"Did you find those questions unreasonable?"

"Er, no?" Contessa offered.

"Try again," Jessica suggested, "with more honesty."

"Yes! He just wanted to know why he wasn't in on it! 'If I'm such an important element in your plan, then why are you keeping secrets from me? Don't you know I'm powerful and my powerful power tells me things?' So we'd explain it, and he'd accept it in the end, but with this stupid martyr complex attitude, like sometimes admitting he didn't need to know or control everything made him this noble, long-suffering soldier. Then--he's useless when it counts. I could have stuffed eight hundred teenagers into dirty lockers with all the time I wasted on him."

Jessica raised an eyebrow. "It's what we talked about before, the fundamental issue that's at stake for you, here. You don't have a sense of self. It was something of a breakthrough, ranting about Eidolon. You were expressing a strong personal preference. Then you reverted to saving the world through evil."

"Um, and I wouldn't do that, because bullying is wrong," Contessa added. "And ineffective. In this case."

"That's . . . progress," Jessica said with a sigh. She reached into her briefcase and withdrew a folder. "Here. It's the first week of a program I'm starting you on. Fill out the chart this week. You identify a stimulus, describe what it makes you think or feel, list the resulting choice, and detail the consequences. Including _emotional_ consequences."

Contessa flipped through the packet. There were twenty-eight pages in total. "I don't have this many feelings in a month, let alone a week."

"The last time we tried a worksheet, you refused to start because I didn't make copies and you were worried you'd run out of room. Or so you said."

"Fine, Jessica. I will do your worksheet."

Later, after the therapist had returned to Bet, Contessa suppressed her instinct to ask her power to end her ill temper. She could allow herself to have moods now, even if they weren't pleasant to feel (and she had to record them on a stupid chart). She could try something else.

_How would someone normal cheer herself up?_

She got her answer.

_I guess I want to do that_.

Following the directions her power spelled out for her, she stole a chest freezer from a manufacturer on Earth Aleph and installed it in one of their kitchens. Then she spent about half an hour on a transdimensional trip to collect fifty-six pints of ice cream. She was just getting started on sampling them all when Number Man came into the kitchen, gripping his tablet. He appeared to be slightly agitated, which meant he was deeply upset.

She thought of things that would cheer _him_ up. "Would you help me make a spreadsheet?" she asked hopefully.

"Contessa," he said, apparently not hearing her question. "You need to find someone who will tell you not to do things like _release five other Contessas into the wild_."

"They aren't Contessas," Contessa said patiently. "They're Fortunas. And this is a secret complex sealed in an artificially created interdimensional void, not the wild."

"We have functionally infinite teleportation! They can go anywhere, including the wild! I—" He stopped as he took in the assortment of bowls and spoons surrounding her. "What are you doing here? You'd better not be baking again."

"I'm not, not that you could do anything about it if I were," she said, annoyed that he'd brought up something she was doing her best to forget entirely. "I wanted to taste each of these ice cream flavors and organize my feelings about them with a spreadsheet."

Some expression or other slithered across his face, but she couldn't quite catch its meaning. He brandished his tablet at her. "Well, I need you to look at _this_."

She took the computer from him and looked down at the screen. It was his search history.

_pretty boys_

_pretty boys yellow hair_

_pretty boys yellow hair no shirts_

The list concluded with an obviously power-influenced

_shirtless blond man_

Ah, so he was _scandalized_. Contessa called on her power to keep her face straight. "I will tell them to remember to cover their tracks," she said solemnly.

"Perhaps you could tell them not to search for that kind of thing at their age."

The suggestion sounded silly in light of the mayhem _they'd_ gotten up to as children, but she took it at face value. "They could overcome any restrictions I put on the device and they'd see right through my attempts to dissuade them from those lines of thought. I'm also not certain I want to discourage any curiosity they might show."

"Excuses," he said.

"It's true my heart wouldn't be in it. They have good taste." She reached out to touch the back of his head, letting her fingernails graze his scalp in a way she knew would derail his train of thought and make him stop talking about her clones' behavior.

She broke off as horrified realization dawned. "Oh, no. The Harbingers. It's not a problem now, but in a year or two, things will get out of hand."

"You could tell them not to go after my clones," he suggested.

She rolled her eyes. "Try telling an adolescent who's _not_ nigh-omnipotent that she's not allowed to have the boy she wants. Perhaps we could clone you again, only this time without the evil."

"You can't solve all your problems with clones, Contessa. Just use your power to make them be sensible."

"I'm not sure I can," she said, thinking of what her psychologist had told her about what had happened to Legend's house. "I've discovered my power doesn't account for at least some of their choices. I can't guarantee I could Fortuna-proof the Harbingers."

"Contessa. You're telling me that you created five children with your personality and your power and you have _no way of controlling them_?" His voice crescendoed as he spoke, and it was a near shriek at the end.

"I trust them—"

"I don't!" His composure finally cracked. "I don't care what's going on in your head, look at this from the outside! You're exposed to the Simurgh for longer than any human in history, and the first thing you do is run off and make five S-class blindspots!"

She opened her mouth, but Number Man shouted over her. "No! No talking! And no touching! Don't come near me until you get us a new boss!" He yanked the tablet out of her hand and jogged off.

Like a little bit of running could stop her if she wanted to catch him.

She didn't.

The door slammed behind him.

"Well, then," she said to her ice cream collection. "I guess I'll just find the most responsible person left alive and _make_ them tell me what to do."

It sounded less stupid spoken aloud than she thought it would. She decided that she would, in fact, go and do just that.

. . .

. . . After she finished this bowl of mint chocolate chip.


	10. Contessa Gets a Job

Contessa did not immediately act on her resolution.

Impulse, she decided, would not serve her well. A lot was riding on her decision, and she needed to ask her question very, _very_ carefully. She would _not_ just latch on to the first person she ran into, not this time.

She was writing down all her criteria in a notebook, thoroughly considering each to make sure that she would reach best possible outcome. So far, she had:

_1\. Not the Simurgh_

_2._

Her reverie was interrupted by barking set off by the clairvoyant climbing into one of the dog pens that surrounded the complex they were visiting. She looked up and saw he was trying to get closer to a group of terriers he'd been following around since they'd arrived at Bitch's headquarters in Gimel. She was there to do a few favors for Tattletale in exchange for Number Man's help in securing her release post-Simurgh.

She checked with herself to make sure Raj would be safe and wouldn't offend their hosts, then dismissed him from consideration. She turned instead to Manton, who was sitting across the picnic table from her, reading a book on parenting girls about to enter middle school.

He caught her looking at him and smiled sheepishly. "Sorry," he said. "It's just that Bonesaw wasn't exactly thorough when she created us. All I _remember_ is that I lost a daughter and that it was bad, but I don't have anything about what goes into parenting. And I'm only a year old, so it's not as though I have any life experience to make up for it. What if they have questions?"

"They'll likely ask themselves," she said.

"Oh, thank God," he said. "They're starting to wrap up, by the way."

"Thank you," she replied and stood up to go find Tattletale.

She glanced back at him as she knocked on the door to the room Tattletale was using as an office, and saw he hadn't put the book down.

Tattletale was sitting on the floor, back against a couch occupied by all four of her clones. She was just closing her laptop when the Siberian let Contessa into the room. Her clones were clustered on the couch, and she directed them to retrieve the clairvoyant. The Siberian followed them out.

"That's creepy," Tattletale said.

"How did they do?" Contessa asked.

"Perfectly, of course, even thought of some things I hadn't. I now possess effective leverage over every major gangleader in thirteen different New Yorks, and I think I can keep it entirely under the radar. I guess I have to say your debt to me is settled."

"Good. Anything else?"

"They're really cuddly," Tattletale remarked. "Not how I'd have pictured them."

"I will talk to them about professionalism," Contessa said.

Tattletale rolled her eyes. "Completely humorless, too, which is _exactly_ what I'd have expected. What the hell did your parents _do_ to you when you were little?"

"They died," Contessa said icily. She realized she was feeling an emotion, and pulled one of the sheets Jessica had given her out of her notebook before filling out one of the lines on the chart.

"What's that?" Tattletale asked, though the tone of her voice revealed she already knew.

"A functional analysis worksheet," she said as, under _response_ , she wrote _fuck with Tattletale_.

Then she started to sift through her options to find the most satisfying way of de-grinning Tattletale.

But _then_ she visualized Jessica's disappointed and frustrated reaction. She frowned.

"Doesn't seem like you want to be doing a functional analysis worksheet," the younger woman said, still smirking.

"Well," Contessa said as she started another line to detail her choice _not_ to fuck with Tattletale, "it's keeping me from devastating your psyche with a few words, so maybe don't complain so much. Or at all."

"I'm not too worried. You need me to tend to certain affairs."

"Meh," Contessa said lightly, finally using her power to tamp her fury down. "I can take care of her."

Tattletale raised her hands in surrender. "All right, point taken. Sorry for the crack about your p--"

"One other thing," Contessa said. "Can you tell Faultline Sleeper's dead? I think she'll want to know, and I think you'll enjoy being the one to tell her."

"Sure," Tattletale said. "I guess this is goodbye?"

"Yes," Contessa said.

Once she made her way out to the dog pen, she discovered that, far from reclaiming the clairvoyant, her clones had joined him. Bitch was there as well, leaning on the fence and watching a cattledog herd them up and down the enclosure.

"They're good with dogs," Bitch said when she arrived.

"I grew up with sheep," Contessa said. "We had dogs to help out with them."

She would have continued, but her clones had registered her presence and converged on her, each holding a puppy. Four identical faces stared up at her with four identical pleading looks.

Contessa sighed. " _If_ we get Miss Lindt's permission, we can get _one_ ," she said sternly. "For _Raj_. And _if_ you are very good and _if_ he says yes, you _maybe_ can play with it _sometimes_."

As one, her clones rounded on Bitch and started speaking in unison, each of them evidently unwilling to entrust _path: get puppy_ to the others. Bitch took a step back.

Contessa stuck her thumb and forefinger in her mouth and whistled, holding the note until her clones settled down.

"Sorry about that," Contessa said.

Bitch looked at the clones doubtfully. "They can take care of a dog?"

"They can. And I'll thrash them if they slack."

"Get with Cassie," Bitch said, shooting the four Fortunas a wary look before striding off.

"All right," she said to her clones. "One. Make sure it's one that will work for him."

Her clones held a hasty conference. At length one of them ran off to collect the blue merle that had been chasing them earlier and present it to Raj.

_Simon_ , he announced.

Contessa gave the dog a second look. "What about Simone?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"Simon it is, then," she said. "We'll find Cassie to make sure everything's okay before we leave."

*

Panacea and Number Man were in the room they teleported into, Panacea reading a book and Number Man heating popcorn in the microwave.

Contessa made a show out of only greeting Panacea (because she was respecting Number Man's boundaries and not because she was being petulant, _really_ ), who seemed more interested in the dog than Contessa's (genuinely, _really_ ) friendly overtures.

"Who's this?" Panacea asked, reaching down to say hello.

"That is Simon," Contessa said.

Panacea ran her hands over Simon's coat and her eyebrows quirked up. "Well, uh, Simon is pregnant. You're going to have four puppies on your hands in a few weeks."

Contessa wheeled on her clones, who were already starting to run away. She seized the hindmost by the collar and let the rest escape.

"You picked the pregnant dog so you would each get a puppy," she said. "After I _told_ you all only Raj was going to get one."

"Er," Fortuna said. "We didn't know?"

Number Man had retrieved his popcorn from the microwave and was watching the proceedings. "You look approximately the same when you lie without your power," he said. Then he added, unnecessarily and uncharitably: "Though I must say the little shrug and feet shuffle routine is exponentially more ridiculous coming from a middle-aged woman."

Contessa acted as though she hadn't heard him; how else was she supposed to respect his request to be left alone? She shifted her grip from Fortuna's collar to her ear—her mother's go-to signal for _we're going to see your father and you're going to tell him what you did_ —and marched her down the hall to their room. Number Man followed them and Contessa wondered whether he was _trying_ to annoy her.

When she arrived she discovered the other three had locked themselves in, apparently having decided that the one Contessa held was a lost cause.

"Open up," she called.

"No!" they chorused.

"And why not?"

There was a pause during which only the sound of Number Man rooting around in his popcorn bag could be heard.

"We're sleeping," one of them said.

"That's not even plausible!" Contessa shouted. She tried the door and found she couldn't even budge it; her power told her the Siberian was on the other side, bracing it against her. "William, don't make me get the remote control."

"They already have it," Manton replied. "My hands are tied, though I'd help them in any case. Pardon me for saying so, but you seem out of sorts."

It was time to ask for backup, she thought, and her eye fell on Number Man. "Can you see if you can talk them into opening up?"

"Why would I?" Number Man asked, leaning back a little to keep a newly arrived Raj's hand out of his popcorn. "I'm not the idiot who xeroxed you without taking any precautions. You deserve every second of this."

"I can make you help me," she suggested.

"Stop it," he said, speaking to the clairvoyant. "This is mine. Make your own."

"Please?" Contessa asked.

He relented and stepped up to the door, clearing his throat. "Children," he intoned, "Please cease and desist . . . whatever it is you're doing."

" _Never mind_ ," Contessa said.

"I'm not sure what you expected," he complained. "I've never been able to stop _you_ from making poor choices."

This had to stop, she thought, casting about for ideas on how to bring things back under control. In that moment, the perfect question to ask occurred to her.

Contessa released her clone. "All right, you win," she said. "But if I find that any of you have neglected anything because of the dogs, or have neglected the dogs because you get too busy or bored to tend to them, I will flay you all and turn your skins into a suit."

Number Man interrupted. "No, please, I don't need to see that."

"I didn't say I'd _wear it_ , Pip, and _shut up_ , I'm making a threat," she said. She refocused on Fortuna. "Did you get that? If you fail to fulfill your duties, I will turn you into an ugly suit nobody will wear. Is that understood?"

Nod.

"Get one of your sisters and meet me at the teleporter. There's something else we need to do before you go to bed."

As she turned to leave, she just so happened to bump into Number Man, causing him to spill popcorn all over himself.

*

Twenty minutes later, Contessa was kneeling in a few centimeters of snow, unzipping a soft gun

case. She removed a child-sized bolt action rifle and performed a function check. Satisfied it was in working order, she looked at the two clones she'd brought with her. They were staring solemnly down at her, both dressed for the cold in padded jackets, winter boots, and beanies.

"Do you understand what this is?" she asked.

Nods.

"Weapons kill. Never use one without your power." She handed the rifle to the nearest one. "You have your earplugs?"

Another nod.

She reached back into the rifle case for a loaded magazine before closing it. "Open fire at exactly 1:32. Five rounds. One each for four security cameras and one for the communications relay they're watching. A man will come looking for you. Let him find you—safely, for the both of you—and give him the letter. Answer all his questions and bring him here."

"Okay," Fortuna said as she pocketed the magazine.

Contessa stood up, brushing snow off her trench coat, and moved the case behind a rock for inconspicuous safekeeping. She checked the time and attempted to start a conversation with her other self.

"How are you doing?" she asked.

"We're—"

"Not all of you," Contessa interrupted. "Just you."

"Aren't we the same?"

"Would you say Ettore and Vico were the same?" she asked, referring to the pair of twins that had lived near her family.

"They didn't have the same name."

"True. I thought it would be better if you started out from the same baseline. That doesn't mean you _have_ to stay the same. I'll train and protect you until you grow up, but what you do in the long run, who you choose to be, is up to you."

Fortuna seemed to consider the point, or maybe she was just staring into the valley, waiting for their target. It was difficult to tell and Contessa had no desire to push her. Instead she adjusted her coat so she could sit down on the rock and wait.

At length a woman wearing a coat and long skirt came into view.

"There she is," Fortuna said. "I'll go get her."

"Thank you," Contessa said. She checked her watch. 1:32 exactly.

Contessa watched her make her way into the valley and approach the woman.

Fortuna tugged on the woman's sleeve.

After a brief conversation, they started to head her way.

Contessa used the eight minutes they needed to finish their journey to check and recheck the conversation she intended to have. It wasn't that she was _nervous_ , of course, it was that her traumatic foray into baking had left her with a healthy amount of _caution_.

She pushed her prudent concerns aside once she was able to hear Fortuna chattering about how her dog was going to have puppies and settled into following the steps her power laid out for her. She stopped talking once they reached the clearing.

The woman Fortuna had collected stopped dead when she saw Contessa and any residual good cheer she'd had from encountering a charming child in the woods vanished. Fortuna released her hand and ran over to stand by Contessa.

"Hello, Dragon," Contessa said.

Dragon's eyes narrowed. "You look like you should be skulking in alleys trying to get teenagers to buy drugs."

"I never skulk," Contessa said.

"You used your daughter as bait? Did Teacher send you to finish me off?" Another, darker look crossed her face. "Or does he want you to bring me back? I'm not subject to his modifications anymore. I will fight."

"She's not my daughter. Twin, sort of. There are five altogether. Legend adopted one. Another is distracting your partner so we have time to talk."

"You can be dangerous when you talk."

"I'm always dangerous. The question is to whom. Teacher and Saint are dead, by the way. I killed them by accident."

"I think it's more likely you're lying than you did anything by accident."

"I was trying to do some things without the help of my power," she said. "It turns out I can't. Or at least I can't without lots of unintended consequences, a surprisingly high amount of negligent homicide among them."

"I still don't believe you," Dragon said. "Though I recognize there is no way I ever could believe you because of your capacity for and willingness to resort to deception."

"Then I'd like to set the question of proof aside for now," Contessa said. She'd considered bringing a cooler with Teacher's head in it, but had decided that would be too much. "You remember how my power works?"

"I remember Las Vegas," Dragon said. "Taylor briefed me after New Delhi."

"Then you know—"

Something heavy and wet hit her in the back of her head and knocked her hat off.

She ran a hand through her hair and discovered clumped snow.

A snowball?

She turned. Her clone was there, staring defiantly back at her.

Either she wanted to provoke Contessa into dunking her headfirst into a snowdrift or there was something upsetting her.

Contessa looked over to Dragon. "I'm sorry for the distraction, but could you give me a minute?"

Dragon nodded, not bothering to keep the amusement off her face.

She made her way over to Fortuna and knelt so their eyes were on the same level. She tried to rest a hand on her shoulder. The child flinched, shied away from the touch. She let her hand drop. "What's the matter?"

"You're a killer," Fortuna said.

"I am," she agreed.

"You didn't _say_."

"I should have made things more clear. Part of protecting you is making sure you don't have to do anything ugly before you're ready to face that choice." She was conscious of Dragon's eyes on her and Defiant's imminent approach. This was important, but keeping to the schedule her power laid out for her took precedence. "You and I can talk about this now, or we can talk about it once we're all together. The others will share your concerns."

"I'll wait. Because of them, not because you want me to."

"That works," Contessa said. Fortuna tromped off to the side of the clearing furthest away from Contessa and sat beneath a tree to stare morosely at her boots.

Dragon's expression was unreadable when Contessa returned to resume their conversation. "Fortuna? Is that your real name?"

"There was someone my parents called that, but she died not long after they did," Contessa said.

Dragon raised an eyebrow.

"What," Contessa said, irritated, "Did you think I sprang fully formed from the Doctor's forehead?"

"I was too busy managing your occasional attacks on my code to consider the results of long-term exposure to the Doctor's particular way of thinking."

"It was more the other way around. She did what I needed her to do. Play a role, make the decisions that needed to be made. Maybe not for the best, especially not after Hero died, but she did what she could."

"If you think that excuses--"

"Not excuses. I need you to understand the relationship we had. She didn't control me absolutely, nor was I secretly the power behind the throne. It was more mutual, more--"

"The blind leading the blind?"

"Or the confused and terrified leading the terrified and confused."

"I don't think the basic tenets of morality are that confusing, even without the programming telling me what they are."

". . . Okay," Contessa said, realizing she should probably get used to not arguing with Dragon if she wanted to make this work. "I don't disagree. Or at least, I didn't always disagree. Things got less clear when I was in the middle of it."

She heard the crunch of snow being stepped on. Defiant entered the clearing, carrying a Fortuna on his back. "Dragon, I found an unsupervised child with a rifle," he announced. "Would you like to adopt it? The child, I mean, not the rifle, which I already took away because I'm not completely irresponsible."

Contessa cleared her throat. "It would be more accurate to say she let you take it away."

Defiant rounded on her, and Fortuna slid off his back and went to sit by her sister. "What did you do?"

"Sit on a rock and get hit by a snowball?" Contessa said innocently.

"I meant how did you make clones. We destroyed Blasto's equipment, and you're not a Tinker—"

"Panacea," Contessa said. "All she needs is biomass and access to a brain with the characteristics she's trying to imbue. And me, to talk her into it."

Dragon spoke up. "I think she's working her way around to asking me to join her team."

"What? Is she crazy?" Defiant asked. He frowned. "I truly hope not. One Simurgh is enough."

"I'm not insane," Contessa snapped. "I'm just less focused. Unmoored, really."

"Why?" he asked suspiciously.

"Ever since I triggered, I've had to rely on other people to help me choose the questions I ask. I relied on the Doctor the most. Alexandria and the Number Man, to a lesser extent. I thought I could work without that guidance, but I failed, and not in small ways. So I asked myself how to find the person who could help me ask the best questions."

Dragon's eyebrows rose. "It led you to me."

Contessa nodded. "I'm not asking you to _join_ my team, Dragon. I'm asking you to _lead_ it."

The AI stood quietly, not showing a reaction. It was Defiant who replied.

"Dragon is a good woman."

"I know," Contessa said. "I asked my question very carefully. I specifically asked for a guide who would let me regain some self-respect before I die. There are any number of intelligent people with an agenda I could get behind. There are fewer smart people who are good, and almost none of those people have any power. Your partner is the exception."

"Jesus," Defiant said at length. "She wants you to redeem her."

One corner of Dragon's mouth twitched up. "Perhaps you were a test case, Colin."

There was a long, long silence.  Contessa knew they were talking to each other, arguing on digital channels she couldn't access—mostly, she knew, about Panacea and babies. It would just take a few more minutes, and a few more sentences spoken at the right time.

She looked over at her clones. The one she'd shocked noticed her looking and took the other to one side, whispering something in her ear. The latter's eyes widened for a moment and then they gave her twin glowers of condemnation.

Yeesh.

Contessa rubbed her forehead, trying to figure out the best approach to take. Had she really been that judgmental—morally stalwart, whatever—or had the memories Panacea copied been retroactively tainted with self-recrimination over the years? She decided that, after her talk with them, she'd haul Number Man off somewhere and use him to work out every last ounce of her frustration.

"We helped Weaver," Dragon said aloud.

"Yes, and where did that lead? 'Oh pretty please, fly me to the sky so I can make friends with the fucking Simurgh.' Which, yes, it worked out, but there's no compelling reason to listen to this one, no risk that's more dangerous than working with a monster. We don't need her."

The glare he gave Contessa conveyed a secondary, unspoken message. He was replying to her letter, which detailed the ways in which _she_ could help remove restrictions on Dragon's code and restore functions his tinkering had destroyed, saying he didn't want an outsider's help with something so delicate.

He'd change his mind eventually.

"That's true," Dragon was saying, agreeing with the surface message. "But I think she needs us."

"I'm losing this, aren't I," Defiant growled. "Remember when you told me about Cauldron? The censorship, the murder, the _human experimentation for profit_?"

"I did do all that," Contessa interrupted. "That's part of the problem I'm trying to address—my mistakes have earth-shattering implications. So do my successes. The PRT, the neutralization of dozens of Class S threats you've never heard of, society's acceptance of parahumans—I had as much of a hand in those as I did in creating the Deviants or, ah, Eidolon's familial issues. That's my power, to build worlds."

Defiant shook his head. "Your power is _winning arguments_."

Contessa manufactured a rueful grin-and-shrug.

"So I'm interested," Dragon said. "Where do you want to go from here?"

"I want you to visit my base. You're settled here, and that's good, but I want you to see for yourselves what I am currently handling. Number Man will want to talk to you about something I can't talk about, and you'll want to hear his concerns before anything else." She could _guess_ how they'd react to hearing about the visitation of the Simurgh, but she didn't want to broach the subject herself.

"You have Number Man with you?"

"Of course, and, between you and me, I think he's bored. The clairvoyant is also with us by his request and we have Harbingers and a Siberian as well. Then I can give you all of Accord's plans and what's left from what Teacher was doing, see if there's anything you want to focus on. I also have a _lot_ of data I took from Tattletale earlier today about the state of the Wardens—the new version of the Protectorate—and the earths in general. Then there is the question of what to do about the three hundred or so Students I have left."

"Students? Teacher's slaves?"

"Yes. I was able to release about half of them, put them into communities where their powers would be useful, but some of them don't want to go or can't go. Either he took too much away from them, or there wasn't anything there when he used his power on them, or they're unwilling to face their old selves. I'm not really sure what to do with them. I considered getting Panacea to make another Teacher and get Riley to see if she could alter the emotional effects of his power, but—"

" _No_ ," Dragon said.

"—I thought you might say that." Contessa reached behind her rock to get the other object she'd brought with her, a Tinkertech disc the size of a garbage can. She tossed it onto the ground between them.

"What's that?" Defiant asked.

"One of Teacher's teleportation devices," Contessa said. "We can use it to set up a portal between my base and here. I'll secure it later. For now, I'd like to get going before Number Man has to bring Panacea back to her father and these two"—she beckoned to her clones—"have to go to sleep."

The disc activated with a bang.  Her clones were the first through the portal, and they were already wriggling out of their jackets before Defiant followed, scouting the room (a kitchen, which Contessa would have considered harmless until a few months ago) before ushering Dragon through.

Contessa conducted a final sweep of the area to make sure there weren't any threats before following. They were safe, barring a resurgence of Simurgh antics. From here it would be a matter of a few conversations—some negotiation, establishment of ground rules, a _little_ more persuasion, and then she'd have her new guide.

And that, she supposed, would be Step One.


End file.
